As we speed up the mountains the prospects behind are enchanting. The valleys are deep and very green while on the other side of one amphitheatre the vast mansion of "Powers Court House," where we shall spend the week-end, stands half way up the hillside in a most beautiful location. From here it appears to be a stone structure of several stories, with long wings on either hand, and even at this distance one can see that the garden and park are very extensive.
Our route southward to Bannow lies through the mountains of Wicklow, which here resemble Arthur's Seat and other hills around Edinburgh. Fortunately the day is fine and the roads dry without dust, but one never suffers from the dust of one's own car and we do not meet any others, hence the ride is exhilarating and beautiful, especially as we approach Glendalough, where the scenery is almost Alpine.
That ancient place lies in a deep valley with mountains towering all around it. Its ruined churches are presided over by one of the tallest and most perfect round towers in Ireland.
Wherever one sees those strange structures they are objects of interest and this one, rising in stately watch and ward over the dead who sleep all around it, is unusually so. It stands in an enclosure so choked with graves that one must walk over the dead to reach it. Two, lately buried I should say, seem to have used the old tower as their especial monument, so closely are their heads placed against its ancient base. A little wooden cross between the graves protests that those who sleep beneath are of the faith of the Nazarene and not of that of the long-dead heathens who, some claim, erected this and all other similar towers in this land, a false idea of course.
Glendalough is very ancient, and dates its foundation back in 618 A.D. St. Kevin of the royal house of Leinster died here at a great age, having lived for years in a hollow tree near the lake and in a cave, to which there was no access save by a boat. His memory has been honored for centuries, and in the peculiar manner of much drinking and many free fights here on the spot where he died, a custom stopped by the parish priest who emptied the whiskey into the stream and burned the shillalahs, after which he forced these people who had been enemies for centuries to embrace over Kevin's grave. He lived to the age of one hundred and twenty years, founding here what became a crowded city, with schools, colleges, sanctuaries for the saintly, and asylums for the poor and sick.
Photo by W. Leonard