Wicklow Mountains

Where it sits. The Wicklow Mountains form a rounded upland running southwest from the edge of Dublin for about sixty kilometres, close enough to the capital that the city's southern suburbs end on their lower slopes. They are the exposed core of the Leinster Granite, a batholith intruded roughly 400 million years ago and the largest body of granite in Ireland or Britain, capped in places by older schist that weathered into the darker peaks. Ice sheets scooped out the valleys — Glendalough, Glenmalure, Glencree, Glenmacnass — and left corrie lakes hanging on the north-facing walls. Lugnaquilla, at 925 metres, is the highest summit in Leinster and the highest anywhere in Ireland outside Munster; Mullaghcleevaun follows at 849 metres, Tonelagee at 817 with the heart-shaped Lough Ouler under its northern face, and the quartzite cone of the Great Sugar Loaf, only 501 metres, looks more like a mountain than any of them.

The story behind it. These hills were a refuge and therefore a problem. After the 1798 rebellion the insurgent Michael Dwyer held out in Glenmalure for five years, and the British administration answered by driving a road straight over the top: the Military Road, begun in 1800 and finished in 1809, running from Rathfarnham to Aghavannagh over open bog with barracks at Glencree, Laragh, Drumgoff and Aughavannagh. Much of it is now the R115, one of the emptiest public roads in eastern Ireland. Later centuries brought other interventions — lead and zinc mining in Glendasan and Glenmalure, the Coronation Plantation of 1831 above the Liffey's source, and Turlough Hill, Ireland's only pumped-storage station, built between 1968 and 1974 with an artificial reservoir excavated into a summit at 681 metres. Wicklow Mountains National Park was established in 1991 and now covers over 20,000 hectares, the largest in the state, protecting blanket bog, heath and remnant oak woodland.

On screen. Wicklow has been the workshop of Irish film for seventy years. Ardmore Studios opened at Bray in 1958 and put permanent stages within thirty minutes of open mountain; Ashford Studios, built near Ballyhenry in 2012, did the same for television. John Boorman shot Excalibur (1981) across the county — the sword in the stone at Childers Wood near Roundwood, the Tintagel battle backdrop at Wicklow Head, Lancelot's fight at the Powerscourt waterfall — and lived at Annamoe while doing it. Mel Gibson's Braveheart (1995) built an English stockade at the Coronation Plantation near the Sally Gap, filmed Wallace's mounted escape at the Blessington Lakes using a purpose-built tower, and staged the Battle of Falkirk in fields at Ballymore Eustace, with thousands of extras drawn largely from the Irish Reserve Defence Force. Vikings (2013–2020) was made entirely in Ireland from Ashford Studios, with longship material filmed at Luggala and on the Poulaphouca Reservoir in August 2012, and its successor Vikings: Valhalla used the same stages. The reason is simple geography: within an hour of Dublin the county offers bog, corrie lake, oak forest, granite crag, waterfall and coast, none of it carrying a modern skyline.

What you actually see today. The two great crossings are the Sally Gap and the Wicklow Gap, both single carriageway, both spectacular, and both above the tree line for long stretches. The Wicklow Way, opened in 1980 as Ireland's first waymarked long-distance route, runs 131 kilometres from Marlay Park in south Dublin to Clonegal in Carlow, and can be walked in sections from Glendalough or Enniskerry. Popular short climbs include Djouce from the Ballinastoe car park on a boardwalk, and Tonelagee to Lough Ouler; Lugnaquilla is a full mountain day and the western approach crosses the Glen of Imaal artillery range, which is live-firing ground and marked accordingly. Sika deer, introduced to the Powerscourt estate in 1860, have spread through the whole massif and hybridised with the native red deer; red grouse, peregrines and merlin hold on in the heather.

Getting there and timing. Access from Dublin is straightforward — the N11 down the eastern edge, the R115 over the top from Rathfarnham, the R759 and R756 across the middle. Public transport is thin above the valley villages; a car or an organised walking bus is effectively necessary for the high ground. Cloud sits on these hills for much of the winter, the bog holds water year-round, and navigation on the plateau between Mullaghcleevaun and Kippure is genuinely difficult in poor visibility because there are no features to steer by. Boardwalk sections at Djouce and the Spinc are the accessible compromise; almost everything else is peat, heather and rock.