Overview
Rossdohan Island grows giant sequoia, New Zealand gums and silver tree ferns a few hundred metres off the Kerry coast, the surviving planting of a Victorian surgeon who came home from India in the 1870s and set about turning a bare island into a jungle. The sheltered position and the warm damp air off Kenmare Bay do the rest: this is a corner of Ireland where things that have no business growing here have grown for 150 years. One tree has a girth of more than five metres.
The honest thing to say first is that you probably won’t set foot on it. Rossdohan is private, owned since 2020 by the Parknasilla Resort across the water, and land access is by arrangement only. For most people it’s an island you look at rather than walk – and the look, from a boat or the Parknasilla shore, is the point.
Known in Irish as Oileán Ros Dochan, it’s a townland in the civil parish of Kilcrohane, barony of Dunkerron South, near the village of Sneem. A single-arch stone bridge from the 19th century links it to the mainland, with a tidal creek running underneath. Sources can’t agree whether the island runs to 132 acres or 140; the truth is somewhere in between, and it hardly changes the walk.
The garden and its two burned houses
The planting began with Samuel Heard, an Anglo-Irish surgeon who retired from service in India and bought Rossdohan in 1874. With his Australian wife, Kate Bradley, he shipped saplings in from across the empire – Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America. By 1875 a mansion stood on the eastern shore, with a glazed veranda and stained glass.
That first house burned during the Civil War in 1922. A second, built in 1946 in a Dutch Cape style, lasted less than a decade before it too burned, in 1955. The skeletal ruin that now frames the bay views is what’s left of it, and the double loss is a large part of why the island reads the way it does – deliberate Victorian planting gone soft at the edges, architecture returning to the trees.
For much of the 20th century the place was kept up by the Walker family, the horticulturists behind Dublin’s Fernhill Gardens, who preserved the farm buildings and added to the exotic collection. In 2020 Parknasilla bought it for a reported €2 million. Owners Jacqui Safra and Tony Daly have gone for slow stabilisation over commercialisation, working with the gardener Gerry Daly to hold the collection together. Safra also owns nearby Garnish Island, which makes Rossdohan part of a wider effort to keep Kenmare Bay’s historic gardens alive.
What grows there, and what lives there
The mild, sheltered microclimate carries plants that struggle elsewhere in Ireland:
- New Zealand gums and kauri – some trunks over five metres in girth, forming a high canopy.
- Giant sequoia – one of the few mature specimens in the country.
- Eucalyptus and bamboo – fast-growing, aromatic, and largely responsible for the not-quite-Irish feel.
- Camellias and rhododendrons – spring colour.
- Silver tree ferns – rare here, thriving in the humid understorey.
A lily pond sits in a quiet glade. A resident seal colony hauls out on the eastern shore, where the water takes on a jade tint, and can be watched year-round. The same humidity that suits the ferns has produced a distinct local mosquito – a detail that says more about the microclimate than any adjective would. Off the western coast, a small sea stack is known locally as Scott’s Rock, after the architect Michael Scott, whose family had Kenmare connections; he visited in the 1970s tracing his ancestry. Rossdohan also has its own scatter of satellite islands – Brown, Green and Illaunrua.
How to see it
- From the water is the straightforward option, and for most people the only one. The island is clearly visible from boat trips out of Sneem or Kenmare, and from the Parknasilla shoreline directly across the bay.
- On foot is possible only by arrangement. Access requests, guided walks, photography permits and the occasional small-group camping are all handled through the Parknasilla Resort reception, case by case, and there are no facilities of any kind once you’re across the bridge – bring water, food and boots that don’t mind mud.
If you do want to land, contact the estate well ahead – three weeks is not too much – and time it for late spring or early summer, when the exotic canopy is at its fullest and the seals are on the rocks either way.