The pilgrim road, revived
St Kevin's Way
For most of the medieval period, pilgrims bound for Glendalough crossed the Wicklow Mountains on foot, and Hollywood was the western gate they passed through. The custom dwindled and was effectively gone by the early 1900s. The modern St Kevin's Way put the route back on the map as a 30 km waymarked trail running east from the village over the Wicklow Gap to the monastic city. It is the most walkable of Ireland's revived pilgrim paths, and the western leg out of Hollywood is the wildest part of it. The village remembers the older saint too in its place names - St Kevin's Chair and St Kevin's Cave are spoken of locally.
A labyrinth carved for pilgrims
The Hollywood Stone
Out in the townland of Lockstown, in the hills west of the village, a large boulder once stood with a labyrinth carved into its face - a single winding path coiled in on itself. It is thought to have been a wayside station for pilgrims entering the Kings River valley on the road to Glendalough: by tracing the labyrinth with a finger, or walking it, or crawling it on the knees, a pilgrim could perform an imagined journey to Jerusalem without leaving the mountain. It is one of only three known medieval incised labyrinths in Ireland and the only one tied to pilgrimage. Shortly after 1908 it was moved to the National Museum, and it is now on display at the Glendalough visitor centre - which means the stone has finally completed the pilgrimage it was carved to mark.
A rare intact 17th-century church
St Kevin's Church
The Church of Ireland building on the green dates from the late 17th century - a plain two-bay, single-storey gable-ended structure with later lean-to porches. It sounds modest, and it is, but that is exactly why it matters: intact churches of that age barely survive in Ireland, and heritage surveyors rate this one among the most noteworthy of its kind in the country. The vaulted roof is original. Five medieval grave slabs from the 13th or 14th century lie in the graveyard, evidence that there was a church here long before this one, even if its footprint has never been pinned down.
A plywood sign and a tall tale
The village that named the other one
Local lore holds that a Famine-era emigrant from this corner of Wicklow carried the name Hollywood to the foothills of Los Angeles in the mid-1800s. It is unprovable and the village knows it, which has never stopped anyone enjoying the story. The fun got physical in 2011 when an imitation of the famous white sign - letters near six feet tall, built from plywood left over after Dancing at Lughnasa was filmed nearby - was raised on Dragoonhill above the village. The film connection is real either way: the assassination scene in Michael Collins was shot in Hollywood Glen, and the broader west Wicklow uplands have stood in for Scotland and elsewhere in more than one epic.