Luggala

Where it sits. Luggala is a valley and a private estate in the northern Wicklow Mountains, held between the granite crag of Fancy Mountain and the slopes of Djouce, with Lough Tay at its head and Lough Dan a couple of kilometres downstream. The Cloghoge River links the two. Lough Tay is small, deep and dark — peat staining makes the water almost black — and a crescent of pale quartzite sand at its northern end gives it the resemblance to a pint of stout that produced the nickname the Guinness Lake. The comparison happens to be doubly apt: the estate belonged to the Guinness family for eighty years.

The story behind it. The lodge above the lake was built around 1787 for the La Touche family, Dublin bankers of Huguenot descent, in a Gothic Revival style with battlements and pointed windows — a fashionable hunting box rather than a castle. The estate came to the Guinnesses in the twentieth century, and in 1937 Ernest Guinness gave it to his daughter Oonagh as a wedding present. Under Oonagh and later her son Garech Browne it became one of the more remarkable social addresses in Ireland: Browne co-founded Claddagh Records in 1959, recorded traditional musicians and poets, and kept a house where Irish musicians, writers and the visiting rock aristocracy of the 1960s and 1970s all turned up. The lodge burned in 1956 and was rebuilt to the same form. Browne died in 2018, and the estate — some 5,000 acres — was sold the following year. It remains in private hands, and the valley floor is not open to the public.

On screen. Luggala is the reason a generation pictures Scandinavia when it looks at Wicklow. The village of Kattegat in the History Channel series Vikings (2013–2020) was built on the shore of Lough Tay, using the lake, the sand and the crag behind it as the fjord that the longships row out of; production on the series began in July 2012 at Ashford Studios twenty minutes away, and longship sequences were filmed at Luggala on 16 August 2012 and on the Poulaphouca Reservoir. The set was dressed, struck and rebuilt across six seasons, and the show's successor Vikings: Valhalla worked from the same studio base. The valley's film history runs further back — John Boorman, who lived nearby at Annamoe, used Wicklow's lakes and crags throughout Excalibur (1981) and Zardoz (1974), and the estate's roads and shoreline have carried fashion shoots, album covers and music videos for half a century. P.S. I Love You (2007) shot its Irish sequences across County Wicklow, and the lake material is routinely identified with this valley.

What you actually see today. The public experience of Luggala is a view rather than a visit, and it is one of the best in Ireland. The lay-by on the R759, the road between the Sally Gap and Roundwood, looks straight down the length of Lough Tay with the crag on the left, the sand at the head of the lake, and the lodge just visible in trees below. Photographers work it in the morning, when the light comes over the eastern rim and the water still holds a reflection. From the same road the Ballinastoe car park gives access to the boardwalk up Djouce and the section of the Wicklow Way that runs along the ridge above the valley — the walk delivers the aerial view of both lakes that the roadside cannot, about two hours return. Lough Dan can be reached on foot from Oldbridge to the south, where a permissive path leads to the lake's sandy southern shore.

Getting there and timing. The R759 leaves the R755 near Roundwood and climbs west to the Sally Gap; the viewpoint is roughly halfway, about an hour from Dublin. Parking is a handful of spaces in a lay-by on a fast, narrow road, and it fills at weekends — pulling in dangerously is the standard local complaint. There is no gate, no ticket and no facility of any kind. Walkers should stay on the Wicklow Way and the public road: the valley floor, the lodge and the lake shore are private property, and the estate has been consistent about that through every change of ownership. Winter light is the most dramatic here, but the road across the gap ices early and is often the first in the county to close.