Four generations and 5,000 species
The Walpoles and the Robinsonian Garden
Edward Walpole was a Dublin Quaker from a linen manufacturing family. In 1868 he took a lease on a small disused mill plot beside the River Vartry in Ashford and began planting it. His model was William Robinson's vision of the naturalistic garden - plants chosen for where they would actually thrive, placed informally among each other rather than arranged in the geometric beds and parterres of the dominant Victorian style. Seven years later, in 1875, Walpole transferred the lease to his four sons: Thomas, George, William White, and Edward. They expanded the estate through additional land purchases until it reached twenty acres, and they began importing plant material from across the world - China, Japan, the Himalayas, Chile, New Zealand, North America. The result was a garden where a Chilean fire bush might grow beside a Japanese maple beside a Himalayan rhododendron, all threaded along the banks of the Vartry in a way that looked accidental and took decades of deliberate decision-making. The Walpole family owned and managed the garden for 112 years. Madeleine Jay bought the estate in 1979. Avoca took the management lease in 2007 and has kept the planting essentially as the family left it. Mount Usher is recognised as one of the earliest and finest surviving examples of a Robinsonian garden in Ireland.
The Wicklow man who wired the world
Captain Halpin and the Atlantic Cable
Robert Halpin was born in Wicklow town in 1836, went to sea as a boy, and rose to command the Great Eastern - the largest ship in the world when it was launched in 1858, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In 1866 Halpin commanded the Great Eastern as it laid 2,600 miles of telegraphic cable across the floor of the Atlantic, connecting Ireland's Valentia Island to Heart's Content in Newfoundland. The cable worked. It was the first durable transatlantic telegraph connection, and it compressed communication between Europe and North America from weeks to minutes. Halpin continued laying submarine cables across the world's oceans through the 1870s - Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf. The British government built him Tinakilly House in Rathnew in 1883 as recognition of his service. He died in 1894, aged 57. Tinakilly has been a hotel since 1982. The restaurant is named Brunel, for the engineer who designed the ship that made Halpin's career.
The gate lodge, the sonnets, and the Devil's Glen
Heaney at Glanmore
In 1972, Seamus Heaney left his lectureship at Queen's University Belfast and moved with his family to a rented gate lodge on the Glanmore Estate - the land that contains what is now the Devil's Glen forest park, above Ashford. He had recently published Wintering Out and was working through a period of writing that would produce some of his most important poems. The Glanmore Sonnets, published in Field Work in 1979, came out of this time - ten poems about the life of a working writer in a Wicklow farmscape, the hedgerows and harvests and river sounds, the difficulty of making a language that fit the place. The collection carries an Ordnance Survey map of Glanmore on its cover. Heaney bought the cottage outright in 1988 and used it as a writing retreat for the rest of his life. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. A 4 km walking loop through the Devil's Glen forest is now named for him, with benches carved with stanzas from his poems set at intervals along the trail. He died in Dublin in 2013.