Qualla: Slieve Miskish Mountains

Slieve Miskish Mountains: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sliabh Mioscais. The Mountains of Malice. The name was already old when the first English-speaking maps were drawn, and the Irish word mioscais carries the sense of grudge and ill-will rather than open warfare - the small persistent kind of malice that a hard country shows the people who try to live on it. The Slieve Miskish range is not high by global standards; its tallest peak, Knockoura, reaches 490 metres. But the mountains rise straight out of the Atlantic at the extreme southwest tip of the Beara Peninsula, and what they lack in altitude they pay back in weather, exposure, and the sheer obstinacy of the underlying sandstone.

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Slieve Miskish Mountains: Four Peaks and a Ridge

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 r...

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Slieve Miskish Mountains: Castletownbere in the Shadow

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Slieve Miskish Mountains: Copper and Allihies

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Slieve Miskish Mountains: What Remains on the Slopes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 document...

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