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Dublin City Coastline and Wicklow Mountains Day Tour
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From €750 per person
County Wicklow earns its “Garden of Ireland” reputation, and this 9-hour private day tour gives you a proper look at it - alongside a solid stretch of Dublin city and its coast before you head south.
Your qualified Irish guide collects you from any Dublin address and takes you through the historic Georgian Quarter, past Government Buildings, and down the coast through Blackrock, Dalkey, and Killiney - spotting celebrity homes and old coastal military towers along the way, with a stop for coffee and sea views in Bray.
Then you’re into the Wicklow Mountains National Park for the heart of the day. Glendalough is the centrepiece - a strikingly beautiful glacial valley where you’ll explore the ruins of an early Christian monastic city and its round tower, take a light scenic walk, and have lunch at The Wicklow Heather. The area has also turned up as a filming location for several Hollywood productions over the years. From there, it’s on to the Guinness Lake, the ‘P.S. I Love You’ Bridge, and Powerscourt Waterfall - at over 100 metres, it’s the highest in Ireland.
The day finishes at Powerscourt House and Gardens, an 18th-century palladian mansion with majestic Italian gardens that National Geographic ranked number 3 in the world’s top 10 gardens. The backdrop of the Great Sugarloaf Mountain makes it particularly striking.
Entry to all attractions is included, and if you’d like to adjust the itinerary, the guide can accommodate variations on request.
The coastal drive through Killiney is one of the nicer stretches of the morning leg. The Vico Road runs along the clifftop with the sea below and expensive houses above - Bono lives somewhere behind a wall here, and several others you’ve heard of. The views over Killiney Bay are what people compare to the Bay of Naples, which is a cliché by now, but it does hold up on a clear morning. The military towers your guide points out along this stretch are Martello towers, built during the Napoleonic period.
At Glendalough, the included entry covers the monastic city and round tower. The 30-metre round tower has its doorway three and a half metres off the ground - that’s not symbolic, it’s because the monks pulled the ladder up when the Vikings came looking for silver. The light walk along the Green Road from the visitor centre to the Upper Lake boardwalk is flat and buggy-friendly, and it takes you past nine of the major monastic ruins. Thirty metres past the visitor centre car park, the coaches thin out quickly.
Lunch at The Wicklow Heather is a proper stop - the Writers’ Room dining area at the front has walls lined with signed first editions of Joyce, Yeats and Heaney that the owners actually bought. Worth a look around before you sit down.
The Powerscourt section at the end of the day comes after a long stretch of mountain driving. If your energy is fading by then, the waterfall is a short, easy walk from the car park and is genuinely impressive. The gardens at the house reward a slower pace - the Italian garden terraces and the view of the Great Sugarloaf behind them are the image most people take home. Enniskerry is the village the estate belongs to - a small, well-kept place on the estate edge where Poppies café on the square has been open since 1982 if you want a coffee before or after the gardens.