Powerscourt Estate

Powerscourt is less a house than a stage set on which a house happens to stand. The mansion sits on a ridge on the southern edge of the Wicklow Mountains, and below it the gardens fall away in a sequence of broad terraces to a lake, with the cone of the Great Sugar Loaf mountain rising exactly where a painter would have put it. Few gardens anywhere use borrowed scenery so deliberately, and the view from the top terrace down to Triton Lake is the reason the estate is so often counted among the great gardens of the world.

The site began as a medieval castle. In the 1730s the architect Richard Cassels, born in Kassel in Germany and later the designer of Leinster House and Russborough, rebuilt it for the Wingfield family as a large Palladian mansion of three storeys, and the Wingfields, later Viscounts Powerscourt, held it for more than two centuries. The terraces came much later: they were laid out in the 1840s by the architect Daniel Robertson, and the whole ensemble of Italian garden, statuary, ironwork and lakes took decades more to complete, being finished only around 1880. In 1961 the ninth Viscount sold the estate to the Slazenger family, who still own it. On 4 November 1974 a fire gutted the house; the shell stood roofless for more than twenty years before being restored in the 1990s, and today only a couple of rooms convey the original interiors.

The gardens repay slow walking. Triton Lake is the climax of the terraces; the Dolphin Pond, the walled gardens and a Japanese garden laid out in a hollow give each part of the grounds its own mood. The Pepperpot Tower in the woods is said to have been modelled on a pepper pot from Lord Powerscourt's dining table, and a pet cemetery keeps the graves of the family's animals. A separate part of the estate holds Powerscourt Waterfall, which drops about 121 metres and is the second-highest waterfall in Ireland, set in a valley where Japanese sika deer were introduced in 1858. The house and grounds have long attracted filmmakers, from Barry Lyndon and Excalibur to The Count of Monte Cristo.

Getting there

The estate is just outside the village of Enniskerry in County Wicklow, about 6 km from Bray and roughly half an hour's drive from central Dublin. Dublin Airport (DUB) is about 28 km away. By public transport, take the DART suburban train to Bray and the 185 bus to Enniskerry, or the 44 bus direct from Dublin city centre to Enniskerry; from the village it is about a 20-minute uphill walk to the house. The waterfall lies about 6 km from the house by road and has its own entrance.