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From Dublin: Powerscourt House, Guinness Lake & Glendalough
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From €3 per person
This is a private tour through County Wicklow by Mercedes limousine, with a qualified guide who keeps the pace to yours. Four of the county’s most celebrated spots in a single day, and no shared coach in sight.
You start at Powerscourt House and Gardens - a Palladian mansion with 47 acres of formal grounds that National Geographic placed in the world’s top three private gardens. From there, a short drive brings you to the Powerscourt Waterfall, Ireland’s highest at 120 metres, tumbling into the valley below. Next is Lough Tay, better known as Guinness Lake - the dark mountain water against white sand looks exactly like you’d expect, and it served as a filming location for the Vikings TV series. The day finishes at Glendalough, where St Kevin founded his monastery in the 7th century. The ruined churches and round tower sitting between two mountain lakes are as atmospheric as Irish heritage sites get.
The tour runs approximately 7 hours from Dublin. Hotel pickup is included. Entry fees at each site are at your own expense, and lunch in Laragh village is on you too.
The day starts in Enniskerry, the estate village at the foot of the Powerscourt grounds. Poppies café on the village square has been open since 1982 and does proper soup and sandwiches; it’s a good pre-gardens stop if the hotel breakfast was light. The village square itself is small enough that you see most of it on the walk from the car park to the estate gates. From there a short drive brings you to the Powerscourt Waterfall - a separate entry fee and a separate car park, but a completely different experience from the formal gardens. Wilder, louder, less curated. It’s worth the extra twenty minutes.
Lunch falls in Laragh, the crossroads village 1.5km east of the Glendalough monastic site. It’s small but well-set-up for exactly this kind of stop: Lynhams has been a pub on this site since the 1770s and does proper bar food; the Wicklow Heather does Wicklow lamb and Irish beef in a dining room whose walls are lined with first editions of Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, and Wilde (not replicas - the owners actually assembled them). The Wicklow Heather is the better meal, but it books up at weekends. Trinity Mountain Bothy is the lighter option if you want soup and a sandwich before an afternoon walk.
At Glendalough itself, the private format means you can stay as long as makes sense. The Green Road from the visitor centre along the Lower Lake to the Upper Lake is 3km return and takes about an hour - flat, well-surfaced, and the route that passes the most significant monastic ruins. The round tower’s doorway is three and a half metres off the ground - the monks pulled the ladder up when Viking raids came up the valley. It worked some of the time.
If your guide takes the Sally Gap road on the way to or from Lough Tay, you’re on the R115 - the Military Road, built by the British Army between 1800 and 1809 to access the mountains after the 1798 rebellion. The bog on either side is treeless, the views are long, and it’s one of the best mountain roads in the country.
The Glendalough car parks fill early in summer - one advantage of a private limousine tour is flexibility on timing. Arriving at the valley before eleven or after four makes a real difference to how the ruins feel.