Things to do
6-
Curracloe Beach
Eleven kilometres of dune-backed sand north of the harbour, used as Omaha Beach for the opening of Saving Private Ryan and largely empty outside July. The strand is flat, the water is shallow and cold, and the dunes behind it are a nature reserve.
-
Irish National Heritage Park
Sixteen reconstructed dwellings along a woodland path on the Slaney, running from a mesolithic camp through a crannog and a ring fort to a Norman motte, each built with period technique. It is the clearest walk-through of nine thousand years of Irish settlement in the country.
-
Wexford Wildfowl Reserve
Reclaimed slobland north of the harbour that winters about ten thousand Greenland white-fronted geese, roughly a third of the world population, along with Bewick's swans and brent. There is a free hide and observation tower, and the birds are there from October to April.
-
Hook Lighthouse
The second oldest working lighthouse in the world after the Tower of Hercules in Spain, a Norman tower of about 1210 built on four metres of wall by monks who kept the fire before it. The climb is a hundred and fifteen steps and the tour is the only way inside.
-
Johnstown Castle
A Gothic Revival house in fifty hectares of ornamental grounds with three lakes, a walled garden and the Irish Agricultural Museum in the old farmyard. The house interior opened to visitors in 2019 after decades as a research station, and the grounds take a couple of hours.
-
Tintern Abbey
A Cistercian abbey founded about 1200 by William Marshal in thanks for surviving a storm at sea, named for its mother house in Wales and later converted into a private house. The walled garden across the stream has been replanted and is reached on a stone bridge.
