Qualla: Caragh Lake

Caragh Lake: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JoachimKohlerBremen, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is hard to stop a holiday house being built in a place this beautiful, but the Kerry slug is doing exactly that. The Kerry slug is small, mottled, slow, and protected by European conservation law, and its presence around Caragh Lake has tangled planning permission in a way that decades of building once routinely overrode. The lake sits between Killorglin and Glenbeigh in the Reeks District of County Kerry, dammed long ago at the Caragh River, with a view across its water to Carrauntoohil that the Irish Examiner once called possibly the most beautiful westerly view in Kerry. Caragh is glacial in origin, and the same ice that gouged this basin shaped the mountains behind it. The slug, in its quiet way, has become the lake's improbable champion.

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Image: JoachimKohlerBremen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caragh Lake: A Lake Built by Ice

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MasterJ69, CC BY-SA 4.0. Caragh Lake lies in the Reeks District, the cluster of mountains and valleys around MacGillycuddy's Reeks in southwest Kerry. Geologists call it glacial in origin: the basin was scraped out by a tongue of ice during the last glaciation, and what fills it now is the Caragh River, ...

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Image: MasterJ69 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caragh Lake: A Station That Doesn't Run Anymore

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MasterJ69, CC BY-SA 4.0. There used to be a railway here. The Great Southern and Western Railway's Farranfore-to-Valentia line ran along the southern shore of Dingle Bay from 1893 to 1960, and Caragh Lake had its own station on the way. It is hard to picture now, but the lake was once a destination on a ...

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Image: MasterJ69 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caragh Lake: Glannagilliagh and the Houses on the Shore

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sarah gallagher, CC BY-SA 2.0. The north-eastern corner of the lake, around the townland of Glannagilliagh, is where the high-end houses are. Several of them predate modern planning rules and reach all the way to the water; some have private slipways, the kind of detail that says quietly how good the boating i...

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Image: sarah gallagher | CC BY-SA 2.0

Caragh Lake: The Slug and the Slow Defence of the Lake

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aidannnuigalway, CC BY-SA 4.0. Then the Kerry slug arrived in the planning files. Caragh Lake and most of its surrounding catchment fall inside the Killarney National Park, MacGillycuddy's Reeks and Caragh River Catchment Special Area of Conservation, a designation under European law that requires Ireland to p...

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Image: Aidannnuigalway | CC BY-SA 4.0