Landscape Around Killarney
It was the last Ice Age that formed the Killarney landscape. Glaciation left its mark on the contorted limestone valleys of the Lower and Middle lakes, and the nearby Devil's Punch Bowl and Horses' Glen show other signs - huge rocks smoothed to sucked-sweet shapes, and improbably teetering boulders. The lower slopes of the mountains are covered with what is often virgin forest; a joy to see in a country that has cut down almost all its trees. Almost all flora seems to thrive in the local climate of high rainfall and humidity. In the woods you'll find a rich mixture of oak interspersed with bilberry, woodrush and woodsorrel, plus mosses, liverworts and lichens (sensitive organisms whose continued survival testifies to the clean air here). As elsewhere in the west of Ireland the vegetation here includes a number of plants generally found in quite different parts of Europe. The famous arbutus, or strawberry tree (so called from its bright-red, and non-edible, fruit), generally grows only in Mediterranean countries and Brittany, and some saxifrages and the greater butterwort, with its fleshy purple flowers and sickly green leaf rosettes, are otherwise found only in northwest Spain and Portugal.
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