Wicklow Heritage Trails

A nineteen-arch bridge over the Avoca, a Gothic church an earl built in memory of his own family, and the Gothic country house that once sheltered a fleeing king and is now an open prison.

From a 5,000-species Victorian riverside garden to the dramatic waterfall valley that gave J.M. Synge some of his happiest childhood memories, this trail covers two contrasting Wicklow landscapes.

A granite-built Wicklow town on the horse's ridge, with a 1798 Rebellion battle site on its southern edge, easily confused with its more famous Galway namesake.

The Meeting of the Waters, celebrated in Thomas Moore's 1807 poem, Ireland's oldest working woollen mill, a French Gothic parish church and Ballykissangel filming location, Holy Trinity Church at Castlemacadam, and the disused Avoca copper and sulphur mines worked for over 250 years — 5 stops through a Wicklow valley village.

A Cistercian abbey founded by a king of Leinster, the Gothic church built beside its ruins, a courthouse that has watched Market Square since 1810, and a hilltop passage tomb and hillfort three thousand years in the making.

A church that houses the oldest complete peal of bells in Ireland, the reservoir that drowned a whole village beneath its waters in 1940, and the 100-foot granite obelisk a marquess raised for his heir in 1874.

An 1881 town hall at the heart of a Victorian resort town, the 1854 railway station that started it all, the vanished Moorish minarets of William Dargan's Turkish Baths, a mute-swan harbour at one end of the 1.5km promenade, and Bray Head's 1950 summit cross at the other.

A five-minute loop around Wicklow's southernmost village, from a brooding tower house that survived siege and rebellion to the church and rival schoolhouses born of a 19th-century fight over who would teach the town's children.

A banking dynasty's parish church, Delgany's oldest rectory and school, and a pair of village pubs — one possibly hiding a 400-year-old thatched inn inside its Victorian face.

A Board of First Fruits church built in 1835 to replace a medieval predecessor wrecked as an 1798 yeomanry barracks, the ruined church itself, a Norman motte raised by an archbishop's nephew around 1180, a 1926 Catholic chapel, and an ogham stone that has moved four times in as many centuries.

A Palladian market house and the church across the green from it, both marking the spot where more than forty men were executed in a single day during the 1798 rebellion.

Powerscourt House, an 18th-century Palladian mansion gutted by fire in 1974 and later restored, its internationally renowned gardens laid out in the 19th century, Ireland's tallest waterfall, and the planned Victorian estate village of Enniskerry — 4 stops through one of Ireland's most visited landscapes.

An 11th-century round tower rising 30 metres above the valley, the largest of seven surviving churches, St Kevin's Kitchen with its stone roof and round-tower belfry, a 12th-century Romanesque reliquary church, Ireland's only surviving early monastic gatehouse, and St Kevin's Bed, a cave above the Upper Lake tied to the saint's legend — 6 stops through one of Ireland's most important early Christian sites.

The valley where Irish clans handed an English army a bloody defeat in 1580, and the ruined barracks the crown built two centuries later to try to control it.

A Norman castle burned in 1301 and rebuilt in 1308, a seaside town first written down in 1795 and named for its own grey stones, a railway station built in 1855 with Isambard Kingdom Brunel's advice, Ireland's first planned housing estate, and a harbour that took twelve years of campaigning to build.

From a 12th-century church and an 1830s convent house to a village holy well and pump, this trail runs out to the beach where 600 rifles were smuggled ashore for the Irish Volunteers in August 1914 — a gun-running often overshadowed by Howth's, but no less real.

A Tidy Towns village on the Wicklow-Carlow border, built around a Gothic-fantasy castle and a granite parish church — and, a few kilometres out the road, the mother house that sent Irish missionary priests to Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean for ninety years. Walk the village core past the school, the barracks and the bridge, then detour east to High Park, headquarters of the Kiltegan Fathers.

Follow the old Dublin–Wexford coach road through Newtown's Main Street, from a pre-1778 milestone to two 19th-century churches and the monuments recalling 1798 and 1916.

Avondale House, birthplace and home of Charles Stewart Parnell, Saint Saviour's Gothic-towered Church of Ireland church, the five-arch 1863 railway viaduct over the Avonmore, the old RIC barracks turned private house, and the derelict Royal Fitzwilliam Hotel overlooking the railway cutting — 5 stops through a Wicklow valley town.

From a ruined early church standing on a Bronze Age site, through Rathnew's Victorian parish core and 'Thatched City' streetscape, to Captain Robert Halpin's cable-baron mansion at Tinakilly.

Follow the causeway village of An Tóchar from its Main Street coaching inn and Gothic granite church, out along the Vartry reservoir causeway, past a President's castle-style home, to the ancient graveyard where a Treaty was carried to its final resting place.

A granite Gothic church raised on the hill above the village, and the courthouse a landlord's tenants crowned with a clock tower to mark his heir coming of age.

Walk the streets of one of Ireland's earliest planned factory villages: laid out from 1774 by Edward Stratford, 2nd Earl of Aldborough, on a 'double crescent' plan modelled on Bath, to house a cotton and calico-printing works on the River Slaney. Little survives of the mill that once employed up to 1,000 people, but the crossroads, a pair of workers' houses on High Street, a townhouse on Dublin Street, the Church of Ireland church, the old national school and a granite bridge over the Slaney still trace the shape of the earl's 18th-century ambition.

Wicklow Gaol, a notorious former prison spanning the 1798 Rebellion and convict transportation to Australia, a ruined Norman castle on a headland over the sea, the ruins of a Franciscan friary, a Georgian courthouse, and the Town Hall — 5 stops through the county town on Ireland's east coast.

From a 1608 coaching inn to the golf-course oak tree where John Redmond urged the Irish Volunteers to war in September 1914 — a speech that split the movement in two — this trail follows Woodenbridge's three meeting rivers past a WWI memorial naming 1,192 of the county's dead, a vanished gold rush, and a long-closed railway junction.