Wicklow Mountains

The Wicklow Mountains are a single great granite intrusion, worn into rounded domes and draped in blanket bog, and the national park declared over them in 1991 is Ireland's largest at some 220 square kilometres. It is also the strangest juxtaposition in Irish conservation: genuine upland wilderness — the Liffey and the Dargle rise in its bogs, and Lugnaquilla tops 900 metres — beginning within sight of Dublin's southern suburbs. The Military Road that threads the high ground over Sally Gap was built after the 1798 rebellion to flush rebels out of these hills, and it remains the emptiest scenic drive in the east of the country.

The park's heart is Glendalough, the "valley of the two lakes", where St Kevin planted a hermitage in the sixth century that grew into a monastic city: the intact round tower, the stone churches, and the carved crosses sit under wooded cliffs at the mouth of a textbook glacial trough. Above the Upper Lake, the Spinc boardwalk climbs to the rim and loops the hanging valley of Glenealo, where feral goats pick across the mine ruins of the nineteenth-century lead workings — the park compresses monastic, industrial, and glacial Ireland into one circuit.

What's worth knowing before you go

Glendalough is served year-round by the St Kevin's bus from Dublin, which makes this the one Irish national park genuinely reachable without a car. It also makes Sunday afternoons at the monastic site resemble a festival; the crowds thin dramatically past the Upper Lake and vanish entirely on the open hill.

The bog plateau is navigationally serious in mist — Lugnaquilla claims more mountain-rescue callouts than any peak outside Kerry — so treat the high rounds as real hill days. Late August into September, when the heather flowers purple across the Sally Gap moors and the crowds are back at work, is the park at its best.