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Wild Wicklow Shore Excursion Small Group Glendalough Lough Tay
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From €85 per person
This award-winning tour is built around cruise passengers - it’s timed to fit your ship’s arrival and departure, so you can spend 7 to 8 hours in the Wicklow Mountains without worrying about the clock.
You travel by small luxury coach (up to 36 people), which means you can get well off the main roads and into parts of the mountains that the big tour buses simply can’t reach. The Wild Wicklow guides know this landscape well, and the route takes you through some genuinely spectacular scenery on the way to the two main highlights: Glendalough and Lough Tay.
At Glendalough you get a full two hours - enough time for a proper guided tour of the ancient monastic city and a walk between the Upper and Lower Lakes. At Lough Tay, also known as Guinness Lake for its striking appearance, there’s a complimentary tasting of Glendalough Irish Whiskey.
Meeting point: The hotel overlooking the port - meet at the front door.
Make the most of your two hours at Glendalough: the guided tour of the monastic city is the start, not the whole thing. With 90 minutes of free time after, the flat Green Road walk from the visitor centre to the Upper Lake takes about twenty-five minutes each way and passes most of the major ruins end to end - the round tower, the cathedral, St Kevin’s Church (the one with the chimney-shaped belfry), and the glacial Upper Lake at the far end. It’s an easy walk on a good path and it’s the reason the valley is worth this much of your day.
The round tower detail your guide will mention: the doorway is three and a half metres off the ground - built that way deliberately so the monks could pull the ladder up when Viking raiders came up the valley. The tower is thirty metres of mica-slate and granite, and the conical roof you see today was rebuilt from original stones in 1876 after a lightning strike. Keep an eye on the door when your guide points it out; it’s the detail that makes the whole structure make sense.
Lunch at the village stop: the lunch stop is Laragh, the crossroads hamlet a kilometre and a half east of the monastic site where the Military Road, the R755, and the Glendalough road all converge. The visitor centre café at Glendalough feeds the bus crowds at noon. In Laragh you have Lynham’s of Laragh for proper pub food - the pub has been here since the 1770s - and Trinity Mountain Bothy for soup, sandwiches, and good coffee. Both are quieter and both are run by people who live in the valley.
At Lough Tay: the whiskey tasting here is a good moment to appreciate what the small-coach format has delivered. This viewpoint is not on most large-bus itineraries, and the lake itself - dark water against white sand, backed by the mountain - earns its Guinness nickname. Roundwood, a few minutes south on the R755, is the highest village in Ireland and where the route passes through; the Roundwood Inn has been running since the 17th century.
Sally Gap and Glencree: the high mountain road between Lough Tay and Glencree valley runs across open blanket bog at around 470 metres. The Military Road through this section was built by the British Army between 1800 and 1809 specifically to access these mountains after the 1798 rebellion. The bog stretches in every direction - treeless, wide, and completely different from the wooded valley you left at Glendalough two hours earlier.