Things to do
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Glendalough Monastic Site
The monastic city Saint Kevin founded, with a round tower, a gatehouse that is the only surviving monastic entrance in the country, and the stone-roofed oratory known as Saint Kevin's Kitchen. The site is open at all hours and free, and the car parks fill before eleven.
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Spinc Ridge Walk
The white route, nine kilometres of boardwalk and steps climbing the southern wall of the valley to a ridge that looks straight down on both lakes and the miners' village at the head. It is the best walk in Wicklow and the ascent is six hundred steps of railway sleeper.
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Upper Lake
The higher of the two lakes, walled by scree and the cliff of Lugduff, with Saint Kevin's Bed cut into the rock face above the south shore. The boardwalk from the visitor centre is flat and takes about forty minutes each way.
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Wicklow Mountains National Park
Over two hundred square kilometres of blanket bog, heather and glacial valleys, among the largest of the national parks and the only one in the east. Glendalough is its main gate and the information point at the Upper Lake carries the route maps.
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Glenmacnass Waterfall
A long white slide of water off the Wicklow plateau beside the Military Road north of Laragh, seen from a lay-by at the top of the fall. The rock above it is polished and lethal when wet, and people have died walking out onto it.
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Powerscourt Waterfall
The second highest waterfall in Ireland at a hundred and twenty-one metres, dropping off a granite step at the head of the Dargle valley below the Great Sugar Loaf. It sits in a private demesne with a gate fee and its own picnic meadow, twenty kilometres north of Glendalough.
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Sally Gap
A crossroads at five hundred and three metres on the Military Road built to flush rebels out of the mountains after 1798, with blanket bog running to the horizon in every direction. It is closed by snow some winters and there is nothing there but the road.