Ireland Guide
Around Dublin: Wicklow, Kildare and Meath
Powerscourt
Address: In the northeastern foothills of the Wicklow Mountains, 19km south of Dublin and less than a kilometre beyond the village of Enniskerry
Website: www.powerscourt.ie
Opening time: House and gardens daily 9.30am–5.30pm; gardens close at dusk in winter
Price: €9
Given fine weather you could easily pass a whole day at the massive Powerscourt Estate. Although the estate is now something of an all-round leisure complex, with a golf course, garden centre and craft shops, and a luxury Ritz-Carlton hotel under construction, the central attraction remains the formal gardens, whose spectacular design matches their superb setting facing Great Sugar Loaf Mountain.
Erected between 1731 and 1741, the house remains impressive from a distance, but most of its interior was destroyed by a fire in 1974 (on the eve of a party to celebrate major refurbishment). Parts have since been re-created, notably the colonnaded, double-height ballroom, though sadly without its original magnificent walnut parquetry or fireplace, which had been taken from a design in the Doge's Palace in Venice. The ballroom is accessible as part of an exhibition, which features displays on the house's former grandeur (including a model of Castle's ballroom) as well as short films on the estate's history and development.
The terraced Italian Gardens slope gracefully down from the back of the house. The uppermost terrace, with its winged figures of Fame and Victory flanking Apollo and Diana, was designed in 1843 by the gout-ridden Daniel Robertson, who used to be wheeled about the site in a barrow, cradling a bottle of sherry – the last of the sherry apparently meant the end of the day's work. A grand staircase leads down to a spirited pair of zinc winged horses, guarding the Triton Lake, whose central statue of the sea god (based on Bernini's fountain in the Piazza Barberini in Rome) fires a jet of water thirty metres skywards.