The Lake Hotel, Killarney

Our room is at the end of the corridor, perhaps because they fear our noise, and contains a four-poster bed, electric fireplace, wardrobe, desk, conversation area, breakfast table, and in the bathroom big mirrors, free-standing shower — and a jet tub! Suite! And the view out our ground floor patio door is toward the lake and mountains. Blanketed with mist at the moment, but over the next four days there’s some hope for sunshine.

Wi-fi has been promised, but over dinner it is generally agreed that the service is spotty at best and unavailable at worst. It may have something to do with the number of people trying to use it, but it seems unavailable at all hours, and although the sniffer on the computers says that the signal is fair to strong, the handshake doesn’t seem to function properly. The front desk people scratch their heads and say it should work, but the signal is generally strongest in the central part of the hotel, which is not where our rooms are.

Dinner is served in the big dining room, and the big dining room is indeed big — ceiling is about 18 feet high and our tables for the group are arranged in one area, with lots of tables elsewhere. We’re here in the off season, so the place is large enough to deal with several hundred guests. The daily rate for our room for B&B is €160 in the summer season when the place is really hopping, and the combination of food, location, accommodation and service make it one of the nicest places we have stayed. and the high season price is about what we would expect to pay for most any urban hotel for much smaller, less amenitous accommodations.

The place has some substantial history of about 100 years and has been added onto and updated from time to time. It is located on Loch Leane (pronounced lane), which was also the site of a medieval monastery now ruined, that has evidence of hundreds of years of use as a school, with leavings of scraps and discarded goods from all over Europe. And the name means Lake of Learning in old Gaelic. The evidence suggests that wealthy families from all over Europe sent their children here to the monks for an education. Right out our patio door there is a stone ruin which we will have to investigate.

So the hotel was built as a Victorian era vacation spot, probably with outdoorsy activities, and the surrounding lands were the Herbert estate. We’ll go see the manor house, Muckross (Galic for Peninsula of the Boar) House, some time the next few days. And the first Irish National park is right next door. If wifi worked, we could zoom in and get a better view of the lay of the land, either with mapping or Google Earth.

Dinner starts with cocktails in the bar, but there are precious few cocktails as such. Guinness, Jameson are easily the most favored libations, and wines of various types. The bartender is a little nonplussed by an inquiry for a whiskey and sour, our personal staple drink, but then again, that’s just a placeholder for the Guinness, Bulmers cider, or wine list.

After dinner, there is a scheduled concert involving the boys, beginning at 9 and lasting aobut an hour. After the concert, a few hardy souls retire to the bar, but the majority are more inclined to bed, so there is no jamming into the wee hours.