Scholarly addition to folk farm

The first sod, albeit frozen, was turned yesterday on a €750,000 “replica schoolhouse” which will complete a traditional folk farm — itself frozen in the 1930s — at one of the State’s key tourist attractions in the southwest.

The project imitates a rural townland and is in the heart of Killarney National Park alongside the Victorian period mansion Muckross House.

It now attracts 700,000 visitors a year, almost as many as the big house.