Ireland: the mysterious Wicklow Mountains and the picturesque Glendalough

Phew, another weekend behind us! Now we have to start working our arses off and to forget about the pleasures of free time… We’ve spent our last weekend in Ireland and we advise you to do the same! It’s a great choice, especially that you can buy a ticket to Dublin from Warsaw Modlin airport for a chicken feed! A return ticket from Ryanair costs approx. PLN 250-300 per person! That’s very decent! If you manage to fit your stuff into a hand luggage, it’ll cost you almost the same as a train ticket from Warsaw do Cracow.

Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to fit into a hand luggage – and not only because we were travelling with a child, but also because we’re bloggers 🙂 After all, that’s the main reason why we’re usually carrying 2 laptops, a camera, 3 lenses, a flash lamp, and lately also one more gadget that I hope to make our blogging even more interesting 🙂 we’ll introduce it to you soon! 🙂 So, we had to pay PLN 190 for a 15-kg-luggage – moreover, we had to rearrange our stuff in Modlin because the luggage was 18 kg and in Ryanair every single extra kilo costs PLN 90! (that just pure robbery!) However, we managed to rearrange our stuff and take off without any delays, land, rent a car and get to our base in Bray on a Thursday night.

Bray is located in the Wicklow county, approx. 20 km from Dublin. It’s rather small (26 thousand townsmen) and quite charming. There’s a sea esplanade, restaurants, it’s a former tourist site, nowadays primarily a place for Dubliners to relax. We’ve treated Bray as our starting point and it turned out to be a quite good solution.

Our 3-day plan in Ireland included:

– driving to the Wicklow Mountains and taking a walk by the Glendalough lake

– sightseeing Dublin, including the Jameson whisky distillery and the Guinness brewery

– a MANDATORY visit to Howth in order to recall the last Easter and to have one of the best seafood in the region!

LEAVING THE CIVILISATION BEHIND…

Tired of the haste and hurriedness of the entire week, we decided to spend our first day away from the bustling Dublin. We set off for the Wicklow Mountains and the picturesque Glendalough valley. It’s a perfect spot for a film… It reminds me of the atmosphere in the “Wuthering Heights” and the views are breath-taking – after all, we’re some several dozen kilometres away from Dublin!

Łukasz has been dreaming of Wicklow Mountains (www.wicklowmountainsnationalpark.i) for quite some time now. He was “niggling” me to go there during our April visit, when we were spending the night in Howth, but we were travelling by suburban trains then (by the way, it’s a great way to travel – I highly recommend it!) and it seemed quite complicated to get to the mountains. Additionally, the weather in Ireland during Easter offered acute winds, freezing coldness and pouring rain. A tough choice: what’s better, the Irish wind or the Polish Easter snow? 🙂

This time, we made the Wicklow Mountains, located south of Dublin our no. 1 destination. We started our trip in Glendalough – a marvellous valley with great walking space, Upper Lake and Lower Lake, and mysterious remnants of a former settlement and monastery. It was impressive!

The settlement includes a St. Kevin’s Church – he was the founder of Glendalough, a an uncommon for the medieval Ireland round tower, and the ruins of the 10th-12th century monastery. This surrounding makes the remnants of the past look incredible and even the cold wind didn’t spoil our sightseeing (it must be an intrinsic feature of Ireland).

We didn’t spend much time in the Glendalough valley – after all, we had a lot of sightseeing ahead of us! But there are several tourist routes around the valley and the longest one, called Wicklow Way is 129 kilometres-long! It takes approx. 5 to 7 days to complete it, and it must be worth the time, as it is one of the most popular tourist routes in Ireland. Unfortunately, we didn’t have that much time – we took a short walk, ran a little with Maks, picked up acorns and colourful leaves, and got some lunch…

We stopped in the tiny (6,7 thousand inhabitants) Wicklow and had the representative dish of the Irish menu – the fish’n’chips. Do I have to add that it’s best when you pour vinegar on the fish and the thick chips, wrap them in paper and eat it just like that, on the street? 🙂 If you have any doubts – yes, it’s the BEST WAY! You have to try it to enjoy the local atmosphere. We found our fish’n’chips in Wicklow in a local fast food – Lina’s Take Away – and they were delicious! 🙂 We regained our strengths and set off to marvel at the Wicklow Mountains…

It’s absolutely amazing that you can find a wasteland quite close to Dublin, without any cars but with carefree sheep walking down the roads! This landscape reminded us of Georgia and the day when we were travelling from Sighnaghi to David Gareja close to the Azerbaijan border. Take a look at the Georgian pictures yourselves and you’ll see that the landscapes are much alike! 🙂

We were delighted by the Mountains – especially Łukasz who was even planning to get up at 6 on the Sunday morning, in order to visit them again by himself, to admire, take pictures, search for incredible views. Unfortunately, he didn’t manage to wake up at 6:00… On the first day of our journey we went straight from the mountains to Howth, 13 km from Dublin, to have one of the best seafood we’ve ever had. Shrimps, calamari, mussels and the Irish fish soup called chowder. And for desert? A mandatory apple crumble… but I’m not going to write about it… we’ve included our impressions from Howth in our posts from April: here  (this one focuses on food) and here (this one is more general, about Howth and Dublin) and I’ll soon tell you what else we’ve managed to see in Dublin… and now it’s time for sleep after our weekend journey… Off I go to the dreamland! 🙂