The range is small enough to inventory. Four named summits run roughly east to west along the spine of the peninsula: Knocknagallaun at 376 metres, Knockgour at 481, Knockoura at 490, and Miskish Mountain itself at 386. None of them is technically difficult; all of them, in the right weather, can be miserable. The Slieve Miskish are entirely on the Cork side of the peninsula - the only part of Beara that belongs to County Cork without ambiguity. The northern part of the peninsula crosses into County Kerry, where the higher and more famous Caha Mountains continue the same belt of Devonian Old Red Sandstone toward the Killarney lakes. Geologically they are the same uplifted block; politically they got divided. The walking is wonderful from both sides.

Castletownbere sits at the foot of the eastern Slieve Miskish, on the south coast of the peninsula. From the town the mountains close off the sky to the northwest, and the prevailing weather pattern - Atlantic fronts arriving from the southwest - means the ridge often catches and tears them, sending squalls down onto the harbour while leaving the upper slopes wreathed in cloud. The seaward face of the range falls steeply to the Bantry Bay coast through a landscape of bog, heather, and outcropping rock that looks much as it must have done a thousand years ago. The few roads cross at low passes. The R572 sneaks around the southern coast; the spectacular Healy Pass runs north over the Caha range; nothing crosses the Slieve Miskish ridge directly.

On the western slope, looking out toward the Atlantic, lies the village of Allihies. In the nineteenth century the slope above it became one of the most productive copper-mining centres in Ireland. The Puxley family - who would later inspire Daphne du Maurier's 1943 novel Hungry Hill - opened the first commercial workings in 1812 and brought in Cornish miners with their families to work the lodes. At the height of the operation, around 1500 people worked the Allihies mines. The work was dangerous and the lives were short. Children worked in the ore-dressing sheds for shillings a week. The miners and their families lived in cottages on the mountainside that are still visible as ruins, ranged along the contour lines like terracing. The mines closed in stages through the late nineteenth century as the ore became uneconomic and the families dispersed - many to the Anaconda copper field in Butte, Montana, where the West Cork Irish made up a substantial part of the workforce by 1880.

The Allihies engine houses and stamping-mill walls still stand on the mountainside, weathered into the same rust-coloured palette as the sandstone outcrops around them. The Allihies Copper Mine Museum, opened in 2007 in a former Methodist church in the village, holds the documentary record - the family names, the pay books, the photographs of men who went down the shafts. The Beara Way long-distance footpath threads up across the lower slopes of the Slieve Miskish, passing the mine ruins, the abandoned cottages, and stretches of open mountain where the only company is the occasional sheep and the constant wind. From the top of Knockoura on a clear day you can see the whole horseshoe of West Cork at once: Bantry Bay to the south, the long arm of Beara running east, Kenmare River to the north, and the open Atlantic running away west toward nothing for the next three thousand miles.