On the road in Ireland...

Thus we move into our Ireland driving holiday. We went back to Dublin airport to pick our booked Hertz car which turned out to be a diesel Volvo wagon. It was quite new, about 18,000km, but had obviously had had a hard life to date. Hertz obviously don't bother to wash their cars either. Like our French rental, this car was equipped with sophisticated eco-technology. Alarmingly, the engine stops whenever the car comes to a stop, and starts up again after a tiny delay when you hit the accelerator. Perhaps surprisingly for a new Volvo, the safety features we appreciated on the Citroen were missing. No reversing camera, no proximity beepers.

Also, no navigator built in, but we had our own Garmin on hand. We programmed it to take us around the Dublin M50 ring road to Bray, then to Powerscourt Estate, then to Wicklow on the coast, then south and west to Kilkenny.

The Powerscourt Falls are the tallest in Ireland, and look as though they take a lot more water in flood.

Powerscourt is private land, a 19Ha estate owned by the Slazenger sporting goods family, and they extract €5-6 from each person to have a look at the Powerscourt Waterfall, the highest in Ireland (121m). The falls are pretty and impressive, and it is obvious that they would be better after a decent rain. The base of the falls is a large picnic area and is clearly quite popular with locals and visitors alike.

The River Dargle in rapids below Powerscourt Falls.

Wicklow is a delightful harbour town. We saw fishing boats coming in, children learning to sail, and lots of fishermen/boys on a breakwater. On a tiny promontory there are the ruins of Black Castle a fort constructed by the Norman family, the Fitzgeralds, in the late 1100's. After attacks by local clans such as the O'Tooles and O'Byrnes, the fort was eventually destroyed, and not much is left of it now.

A fisherman on the Wicklow breakwater while a nearby yacht race gets under way.

The ruins of the Norman fort "Black Castle" at Wicklow.

After passing Brittas Bay on the R750 coast road, it was getting late (but not dark) so we set our Garmin to 'fastest route', and it took us down the N11 main road as far as Ferns, then headed cross country in a zig-zag fashion west until we reached Kilkenny.