The two peaks
Someone in the Bronze Age looked at these two hills and decided to make the resemblance unmistakable. The Paps of Danu are a pair of rounded summits in the Derrynasaggart Mountains, east of Killarney, 694m on the eastern top and 690m on the western. Their Irish name, Dá Chích Anann, means ‘the breasts of Anu’, and on each summit sits a cairn built around 2500 BC. The archaeologist Frank Coyne has argued that the cairns were placed deliberately just off the true crest, so that seen from the low ground to the north-east they sit like nipples on the two hills. The eastern cairn is the bigger of the pair: roughly 4m high and 16m across.
Connecting the summits is a line of stones the locals call Na Fiacla, the Teeth. It is thought to have been a processional route, and Wikipedia records the frank local description of the cairns and stones as ‘stone nipples on the great breasts of the mother goddess’. Whatever you make of that, the sightlines are the reason to climb: on a clear day the view runs across the rolling ground of Sliabh Luachra to the outline of Mullaghanish in County Cork.
The City, at the foot of the hills
If the legs aren’t up for the climb, the more unusual half of the site is a few minutes’ walk from the road. Just north-east of the peaks is Cahercrovdarrig (Cathair Crobh Dearg, the ‘Red Claw Fort’), known locally as The City: a circular stone enclosure holding a possible ruined megalithic tomb, an ogham stone, an earthen mound, a cross-inscribed stone altar and a holy well that bubbles up when the water table is high. Ritual has happened on this barren, windswept ground for something like 3,800 years, beginning as a Beltane site.
The May Day gathering ran here until the Second World War: music, dancing, drink and feats of valour, with people circling the well in prayer and walking their cattle around it for luck. A Mass was added for the first time in 1925. After the war only the penitential rites and a small May Day Mass survived, until Comhaltas brought the music and dancing back in 1983. Come on 1 May and you can still catch the modest service at the altar.
The Fianna’s hunting ground
The townland name, Derrynafinna (Doire na Féinne), means ‘Oak Wood of the Fianna’. Local tradition puts Fionn MacCumhaill’s warrior band hunting deer through these oak woods with their pack of 500 Irish wolfhounds. Anu herself was a goddess of fertility, water and the land, and the whole ridge kept its pull as a place apart long after the hunting stories.
Walking the peaks
This is a hillwalk, not a scramble: no technical ground, but rocky and boggy underfoot, so wear boots and expect wet feet after rain. The usual line is from the Clydagh Valley up to the East Pap, about 4.5km and a 448m climb, which most people do in three to four hours there and back. The far, western approach over the Slyggudal Pass is a narrow gravel road broken by cattle gates and not fit for an ordinary car; the section on the north side down to Lough Glannafreaghaun was only declared a public road in 1974. Take the eastern route unless you know the pass.
One honest warning about the top: there is no shelter and no reliable phone signal above the treeline, and the weather here turns fast. Download your route before you leave the car.
Getting there and practical info
Parking: the usual spot is a lay-by near Shrone in the Clydagh Valley – a pull-in, not a car park, and it fills on solstice mornings and dry summer weekends, so come early. There are no toilets, shops or shelters anywhere on the mountain, and no admission fee to any of it.
Solstice and winter walks: guided sunrise ascents have run in June as part of the Killarney Walking Festival, climbing in the dark to reach the ridge just before the light spills across Sliabh Luachra. Around the winter solstice, local clubs organise shorter charity walks with food, drink and a bit of entertainment laid on at the finish. Check whether either is running before you build a trip around it.
Public transport: Bus Éireann runs to Killarney; from there it’s a taxi to the trailhead, roughly 15 minutes. There is no bus to the mountain itself.
Whatever the forecast says, read it twice before you set off – the tops make their own weather, and there’s nothing up there to duck under when they do.