The mountain wall behind Cloghane and Brandon is now part of a national park, though you would not know it from the ground. Nothing has been built, gated, waymarked or charged for. What changed is who owns it.
In August 2023 about 1,400 acres at the Conor Pass, some thousand acres of land and four hundred of forestry, went on the market at ten million euro. The State bought it. A second, separate purchase followed: the Owenmore fishery, a source-to-sea holding of lakes and river draining off Mount Brandon and the pass, at a guide price of about one and a half million. The government has never published either final price.
On Earth Day, 22 April 2024, the Conor Pass, Mount Brandon, the Owenmore catchment and the Inch dune system were folded together with Derrynane, Sceilig Mhichíl, the Blaskets, the Valentia tetrapod trackway, Little Skellig, Puffin Island and the surrounding waters into Páirc Náisiúnta na Mara, Ciarraí, Ireland's first marine national park and, at some seventy thousand acres, its largest. Conor Pass was described in the announcement as the gateway to it.
Less than you might expect. A national public consultation ran from November 2024 to the end of January 2025; no report of the submissions has been published. No management plan exists. The park's own page still lists its facilities as to be decided and its opening times as to be confirmed.
The significant development is legal rather than physical. In July 2026 the Minister of State for Nature, Heritage and Biodiversity announced the intention to draft a National Parks Bill, the first statutory framework for national parks in the State. Ireland's eight national parks currently have no basis in law at all. The Bill would make conservation their primary statutory purpose, require management plans, create a proper designation process and confer byelaw powers with enforcement behind them. A general scheme is to be developed over the coming months.
It has not been uncontested. Fishermen objected that they were not consulted before the announcement. Hill farmers, through the Irish Natura and Hill Farmers Association, raised the prospect of a large increase in visitors and were given assurances that access would be tightly controlled and limited to existing paths, that the area would not become a giant car park, and that existing grazing would continue. Conservationists have pointed out that sheep grazing and peat extraction continue on the purchased land and that no management plan has appeared. Those two sets of assurances, gateway to the country's largest national park and tightly controlled access, are not obviously compatible, and nothing has yet reconciled them.
Mount Brandon at 952 metres and Brandon Peak at 840, the Stradbally range, the high sea cliffs of Brandon Head, the Owenmore valley and the pass road itself at 456 metres. Almost all of it was already protected: Mount Brandon Special Area of Conservation covers eleven Annex I habitats here, including active blanket bog, wet and dry heath, alpine heath, siliceous scree and the oligotrophic corrie lakes, and two Annex II species, the freshwater pearl mussel and the Killarney fern. Chough and peregrine, both Annex I birds, breed here, and the site also holds Arctic char, large heath butterfly, alpine bistort and alpine saw-wort. The Dingle Peninsula Special Protection Area, for fulmar, peregrine and chough, overlaps it.
That is the important point about the park, and the government's own release makes it: every constituent site already carried protection under European law, and the designation brought no additional regulatory restriction. What it brought was public ownership.
Open all year, free, no facilities. Park at the summit, or at the smaller pull-in on the Castlegregory side near the waterfall, from which a short walk leads to the falls and, beyond, a rocky scramble up to the corrie lake. That is an informal path, not an official trail. Hillwalking routes to Mount Brandon run from the pass and from Faha above Cloghane; they are serious walks and not park infrastructure.
Remember the two-tonne limit on the pass road. And if all you want is the view, the lay-by at the top on a clear evening is one of the best half-hours on the peninsula.
Reported prices and acreages come from Irish Times and Irish Examiner reporting that the Department declined to confirm at the time. Published figures for the park's total area have themselves varied between seventy thousand acres, seventy-seven thousand acres and thirty-one thousand hectares.