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Dublin to County Wicklow & Glendalough Private Day Trip by Car
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From €1008 per person
County Wicklow is right on Dublin’s doorstep and most visitors never quite get there. This private day trip fixes that. You travel with a 5-star guide, fluent in the language you select when booking, and pick up from your accommodation in Dublin.
Two options to choose from:
8-hour: Wicklow and Glendalough - Powerscourt Waterfall, the Wicklow Mountains, Sally Gap, and Glendalough.
10-hour: Wicklow, Glendalough and Powerscourt Gardens - Everything in the 8-hour option, plus skip-the-line entry to the Powerscourt Estate and Gardens.
Powerscourt Waterfall and Glendalough - Powerscourt Waterfall is the tallest in Ireland, dropping 121 metres at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains. From there, you visit Glendalough - a glacial valley with two lakes and the well-preserved ruins of a 6th-century Early Christian monastic settlement. (120 min)
Wicklow Mountains National Park - Over 20,000 hectares of mountain, lake, and deep glacial valley. One of the largest protected areas in Ireland and genuinely wild in places. (120 min)
Lough Tay - Also known as the Guinness Lake, Lough Tay sits in a dramatic glacial hollow and is one of the most photographed spots in Wicklow. (60 min)
Sally Gap - A mountain pass 500 metres above sea level with sweeping views across the surrounding Wicklow Mountains. (60 min)
Powerscourt Estate - 10-hour option only. Skip-the-line entry to the Powerscourt Gardens, with formal gardens, ornamental lakes, statues, and hidden corners. Powerscourt House has been voted one of the top ten houses and mansions in the world by the Lonely Planet Guide. (180 min)
Return to Dublin - Drop-off at your accommodation. (60 min)
At Glendalough, walk past the Lower Lake to the Upper Lake. The visitor centre and round tower get the coach crowd between 10am and noon. The real experience is the Green Road running from the round tower along the Lower Lake through the woods to the Upper Lake boardwalk - a flat, 3km walk each way that takes you past the major monastic ruins and ends at a quiet beach. At Glendalough, the Upper Lake is where the noise fades and the valley makes sense. The round tower itself is over 30 metres of mica-slate and granite, built around the 10th or 11th century, with the doorway set three and a half metres up the wall - it wasn’t symbolic, it was defensive against Viking raids.
Eat in Laragh, not at the Glendalough visitor centre café. The actual village near Glendalough is Laragh, 1.5km east of the monastic site at the junction of three mountain roads. Lynham’s of Laragh has been a pub since the 1770s - it predates the Military Road the British built to flush rebels out of these mountains. The Wicklow Heather restaurant does a proper dinner - Wicklow lamb, Irish beef, game in season - and has a bar room with walls of genuine first editions of Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett. Book ahead at weekends.
The Spinc boardwalk rewards the effort. If you’re fit and the guide has flexibility, the Spinc trail (9km loop, about 4 hours) climbs the south side of the Upper Lake via a boarded staircase and runs a high ridge with the lake directly below. It’s the single best walk in Wicklow. You don’t need to do the whole loop - even climbing to the ridge for the view and coming back is worth it.
Sally Gap to Lough Tay: this is the high-mountain road. The route over Sally Gap (500m above sea level) on the R115 - the old Military Road, built between 1800 and 1809 to flush the rebel Michael Dwyer out of these mountains - and down past Lough Tay in its glacial hollow is the kind of Wicklow that most day-trippers don’t reach. The valley is dramatic. Ask your guide to stop at the Lough Tay viewpoint above Luggala House and look down into the hollow. The drive home via this road, dropping back down through the heather toward Dublin in the late afternoon, is worth choosing over the faster motorway route.
Powerscourt Waterfall drops 121 metres. It’s the highest continuous-flow waterfall in the Republic - a separate drive and a separate entry from the gardens, worth doing as two distinct experiences. The waterfall is wilder and louder than the formal gardens; it generates its own weather. The 10-hour option adds the Enniskerry estate gardens, which National Geographic ranked third in the world. Allow at least two hours for the terraces, the walled garden, the Japanese garden, and the Triton Lake. Poppies café on Enniskerry’s village square has been open since 1982 and is a more honest lunch stop than the estate café inside the house.