A week is so much too short a time for visiting even a small part of Ireland, but that’s all the time we had. We snuck in a trip to Glendalough in the Vale of Avoca in Wicklow National Park on the day we were en route to Dublin for our flight home early the next day.
Approaching the Vale of Avoca you are actually not far from a major highway and to the ever-spreading outskirts of Dublin, but if you approach over the country roads it takes much longer and in that rugged, remote area you feel miles from civilization. Imagine how St. Kevin felt when he set up a monastic order at Glendalough in the 6th century! Its beautiful ruins are much visited today.
The town of Avoca overlooks the valley. The valley has two lakes, the upper and the lower, with the monastic settlement in between the two. The valley is particularly beautiful, especially the site where a big and a small river come together to form the River of Avoca. Sir Thomas Moore made these rivers meeting famous with his song:
There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet,
As the vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet;
Oh, the last rays of feeling and life must depart,
Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart.
Reddish stones in the stream and on the mountainsides are reminders of the copper mining that was done here at one time.
We came to hike on a cold, blustery morning, accompanied by several of the Day families who had been so welcoming to us all week. We were every age from the seventies down to seven, strung out in a long line as the children scrambled ahead and their parents tried to keep up with them, and we tried to keep up with the parents!
We walked up the valley toward the wild beauty of the Upper Lake, rimmed by the mountains on which we were hiking. In wintertime, the mountain across from us looked a lot more like Scotland than Ireland, its heathers and gorse thriving in the treeless landscape.
When Fred and I realized the “through hikers” were headed around the top of the Upper Lake on a seven-mile hike with poor footing and a heavy wind blowing, we were wusses and chose to take a different road at a higher elevation than the one we had come out on to return home. This gave us gorgeous views of the Vale of Avoca from a height.
When the others got back to the parking lot, each family opened the “boot” of their car or van, and out came our last Irish feast, complete with wonderful cheeses, hot food, and smoked salmon with all the fixings.
Reluctantly, we said goodbye to the most hospitable people in the world, and climbed into the hired car that, in less than an hour, dropped us off in the soulless lobby of a hotel at the Dublin Airport.
