Powerscourt Estate

Where it sits. Powerscourt lies just outside Enniskerry in north Wicklow, twenty-five kilometres south of Dublin, on a shelf of ground that falls away southward towards the Dargle valley. The house looks down a stepped garden to a lake and then straight at the Great Sugar Loaf, whose quartzite cone sits precisely on the axis of the design — the terraces were laid out to frame it. The estate covers about 47 acres of formal gardens within a much larger demesne, and the separate waterfall property lies six kilometres further up the Dargle, at the foot of the Djouce massif.

The story behind it. The Le Poer family held a castle here from the thirteenth century, and its fabric survives inside the present building. Between 1731 and 1741 Richard Wingfield, first Viscount Powerscourt, had the German-born architect Richard Cassels rebuild it as a Palladian house of thirteen bays, keeping the medieval towers. The gardens took a further 150 years. The great Italianate terraces below the house were designed in the 1840s by Daniel Robertson, an architect who worked, according to estate tradition, from a wheelbarrow with a bottle of sherry to hand, and were built by a workforce of a hundred men over a dozen years. The Triton Pond at the foot of the terraces takes its bronze figure from Bernini's fountain in Rome and throws a jet some thirty metres; the winged horses flanking the steps carry the Wingfield crest. A Japanese garden was added in 1908 on reclaimed bog, and a walled garden, a pet cemetery and a tower folly followed. On 4 November 1974, on the night before a party to celebrate the completion of a long restoration, the house was gutted by fire. The shell stood open for two decades; the roof was replaced in 1996 and the ground floor now holds shops, a garden centre and a terrace café, with the upper storeys unrestored.

On screen. Powerscourt's most significant credit predates the fire by months. Stanley Kubrick filmed part of Barry Lyndon (1975) in the house, using its ballroom as the interior in which Redmond Barry is set to spy on the Chevalier de Balibari — footage that now records rooms which burned in November 1974 and were never restored to that state. The Irish leg of Kubrick's shoot also took in Cahir Castle, Dublin Castle, Huntington Castle and Waterford before the production decamped to England after warnings of a threat to the unit. Seven years later John Boorman used the estate's waterfall for the duel between Arthur and Lancelot in Excalibur (1981), one of that film's most-quoted images: the two men fighting in and around falling water, with the Wicklow granite behind them. Between them the two productions cover the estate's whole range — a candlelit eighteenth-century interior and a hundred-metre cascade in open mountain, four miles apart.

What you actually see today. The garden route runs from the house terrace down the stone steps, around the Triton Pond, through the Japanese garden and the pet cemetery, past the walled garden and the Pepperpot Tower, and back along the woodland walk — about ninety minutes at a normal pace, with benches and a rhododendron display that peaks in May. Powerscourt Waterfall is a separate site with its own entrance off the R760, a 121-metre fall of the Dargle and the highest in Ireland, with a picnic meadow, a playground and a walking loop under beech and larch. The estate also holds two golf courses and a hotel, and the Enniskerry village square at its gate is a planned estate village worth ten minutes on its own.

Getting there and timing. Enniskerry is about forty minutes from central Dublin by the N11 and R117, with a bus service from the city to the village and a short uphill walk or taxi to the gates. Garden and waterfall have separate admissions with a combined ticket available. The formal gardens are largely level or ramped and among the more wheelchair-friendly heritage gardens in Ireland; the waterfall site has a level path to a viewing area, with rougher woodland loops beyond. The gardens open year-round and are at their emptiest on a bright winter morning, when the terraces have frost on them and the Sugar Loaf is sharp on the skyline.