The Wicklow Mountains and Glendalough

The Guinness Lake

Our final day trip from Dublin was through the Wicklow Mountains, along Military road with a visit to Glendalough.  This was by far the most popular outing, and there were a lot of people along on this one.  Which of course slowed everything down a bit.  I want to give a shout-out to the tour company we used though, if you are ever in Dublin and want to do a day trip somewhere I would give Day Tours Unplugged a go.  The tours were designed to be smaller, using just mini-buses rather than massive coaches, which is

View across the Wicklow Mountains

always my main fear when going on these commercial tours.  The tour guides were really friendly and knowledgable as well.


Military Road was built through the Wicklow Mountains in the early 1800's.  After the attempted revolution in 1798 some of the rebels hid out in these mountains for a number of years.  The English didn't like the idea of having a safe haven for these people anywhere in Ireland and so built the road to aid access to the area.  It's not much of a road though, little more than a single lane winding through the mountains. 

Is this heather?

Though when you say mountains, the highest is only 915 m, which is only 100m higher than Black Mountain for those people from Canberra.  Though it feels a lot more wild out here, much more like the Alpine National Park in Australia than the centre of Canberra, with a chill wind blowing and grey clouds.  It still feels really remote here, and people still come out to cut peat.  As we were driving along you could see the trenches where peat had been taken from previously.


Apparently members of the Guinness family own a bit of land out here, and a number of TV shows and movies have been filmed in the mountains.  The white marquee in the first picture is set up for the Game of Thrones TV show.  Which kind of explains why we saw one of the actresses in Belfast later on.  Anyway the lake is called the Guinness lake because the water is black but there is a strip of white sand at the top, so it kind of looks like a glass of Guinness, though perhaps it doesn't hurt that a Guinness family member also owns the land.

You can also see

More heather in bloom, and our tour bus waiting for us

the heather in flower in the shot to the left.  I was pretty excited about that.  I have often heard stories of the heather in Scotland being in bloom and whole hillsides covered in purple, so it was nice to see for myself.

There seemed to be a number of walking tracks heading through the mountains, so I think if I ever start missing the rolling hills of the Australian Alps I know where to go for a hike.

View down the valley in the Wicklow Mountains

The round tower at Glendalough

After emerging from the mountains we headed to Glendalough, the -ugh is pronounced -ch, which is this wonderful monastic site.  Ireland really did do the monastry well, and this is a great example of it. It's set in a valley with a couple of lakes right nearby.  There is a perfectly preserved round tower of about 30m high, though the roof was restored with stones found inside the tower.  These are funny things, the towers, with only one entrance a couple of metres above the ground.  Apparently they used to be bell towers, places to store valuable manuscripts, and the monks had a lot of manuscripts, and places of refuge.

The tower amongst the graves

The main monk associated with Glendalough is St Kevin, who was born in 498 and died in 618, I think one of those dates must be wrong.  This period seemed to be the golden age for Ireland, while the rest of Europe was being ravaged by barbarian tribes, the monks here were busy illuminating manuscripts.  And there's some really nice manuscripts to come out of that time.

St Kevin's Kitchen

As well as the round tower there is a building called St Kevin's kitchen, so called because the belfy, added later, looks like a chimmney.  This building is particularly impressive due to the fact that it has a completely stone roof.  Most of these buildings here date from the 10th to 12th centuries.

The stone roof of the kitchen

Glendalough was seriously seething with tourists, but the site of the round tower is only a small part of a much larger complex.  About 1km further up the valley there are two lakes, which are lovely and peaceful, with many fewer people.  It was here that St Kevin supposedly first established the monastery and lived for a while as a hermit on the banks of upper lake.  One of the stories about him goes that he rejected a local woman's advances by throwing her into the lake.  Though according to the sign above it looks like walking on water is permitted, so perhaps she was OK.

Archeologists hard at work with their footpath find

The day we visited, the upper lake was the scene of a large archeological dig.  It must be quite fun to be studying archeology in Ireland, as perhaps whole semesters are devoted to just travelling around and digging things up. There was definitely a hierachy amongst the workers though.  One person was in charge or the heavy digging, and he would get told off if he dug too ferociously, fair enough really considering what they are dealing with.  It kind of feels like you could dig anywhere in Ireland though and would find some sort of ancient remains.  Perhaps they save the less precious sites for the students to mess around in.

More archeologists preparing the grounds.  Nice location for a dig site

The upper lake of Glendalough

The Reefert Church + graveyard

If you keep walking you'll come across even more remains.  Seriously this place is teeming with ruins.  This was yet another church and yet another grave yard.  This particular church is the Reefert Church, whose name means burial place of the kings.  So perhaps that explains the graveyard.

More graves by the church

More heather flowering on the hillsides

A bit of fauna by the lakes