Sally Gap

Where it sits. The Sally Gap is a crossroads on open blanket bog at about 500 metres in the northern Wicklow Mountains, where the Military Road running north to south over the plateau meets the R759 coming east from Kilbride towards Roundwood. There is nothing at the junction itself — no building, no signpost beyond the road signs, no shelter — and that is the character of the place. In every direction the ground is peat, heather, bog cotton and drainage channel, with Kippure and its television mast to the north, Djouce to the east, and Mullaghcleevaun's long back to the southwest. On a clear day the view reaches to the Irish Sea; in cloud the visibility drops to a few car lengths and the crossroads becomes genuinely disorienting.

The story behind it. The road that made the gap passable was a counter-insurgency project. After the 1798 rebellion, rebels under Michael Dwyer used the Wicklow uplands as a base that the army could not reach, and between 1800 and 1809 the British administration cut the Military Road from Rathfarnham over the summits to Aghavannagh, garrisoning it with barracks along the way. It is now the R115, and the stretch either side of the Sally Gap is the most exposed part of it. Nearby stands the Coronation Plantation, an enclosure of Scots pine and oak planted from 1831 by the Marquess of Downshire to mark the coronation of William IV, its commemorative stone still standing in the bog; the trees have thinned but the plantation boundary is clear on the ground. The high bog to the northwest, Liffey Head Bog, is the source of the River Liffey, which rises here about twenty kilometres from Dublin and then travels 132 kilometres in a loop through Kildare before reaching the city.

On screen. Two productions made lasting use of this ground. Braveheart (1995) built an English stockade around an old hunting lodge within the Coronation Plantation at the Sally Gap and shot the sequence there, part of an Irish leg that also took in the Curragh in Kildare for the Battle of Stirling Bridge, the Blessington Lakes for Wallace's escape, and Trim Castle in Meath for the city of York. The R759 and R115 also supply the road footage that recurs whenever a film wants an Irish car journey with nothing in it — P.S. I Love You (2007) shot its Irish half in County Wicklow, and the empty moorland roads and the view down to Lough Tay belong to the same stretch. Advertising crews have used the crossroads for decades for the same reason: it is fifty minutes from Dublin and there is not a building in the frame.

What you actually see today. The single unmissable stop is a kilometre and a half east of the crossroads on the R759, where a lay-by looks down into the Luggala valley at Lough Tay — dark peat-stained water with a crescent of white sand at its head, so exactly like a pint of stout that the lake has been nicknamed after it for generations. The estate below is private and there is no public access to the shore; the view from the road is the view. South from the crossroads the Military Road drops past Glenmacnass, where the river slides down a granite slab in a fall of about eighty metres beside a lay-by, and continues into Laragh and Glendalough. Walkers use the crossroads as a start point for Kippure, for the long boggy plod to Mullaghcleevaun, and for the Djouce boardwalk further east.

Getting there and timing. From Dublin the direct approach is the R115 from Rathfarnham through Glencree, about fifty minutes; from Enniskerry the R759 climbs past Powerscourt Waterfall. There is no bus, no fuel, no food and frequently no mobile signal. The road is narrow, unfenced and used by sheep, and it is one of the first in Leinster to close in snow or ice — closures typically come without much notice between December and March. Cyclists climb it constantly in summer and it is a fixture of the Wicklow 200. Late August and September give the heather in flower and the clearest air of the year, and the low sun in the last hour of daylight is what makes the moor photograph as something other than brown.