Welcome to Tinahely. You're standing in the Square of one of the prettiest small towns in south Wicklow — a Georgian-era market town laid out in the late eighteenth century, and still doing, in its quiet way, the same job it was built for. This is a one-hour walking tour of the town itself: a loop of about two kilometres, taking in the Square, the Courthouse, the Church of the Assumption, the old fairgreen, and a handful of the side-streets where most of the history actually lives. Flat, easy underfoot, and you'll never be more than three minutes from a cup of tea.
The name Tinahely comes from the Irish Tigh na hÉille — the house of the strap or the house of the bridle — almost certainly a reference to the town's long history as a horse-trading centre. For three hundred years, a twice-yearly horse fair drew buyers from Dublin, Wexford, and the midlands, and at its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, a thousand horses could change hands in a single day on the fairgreen below the church. The fair faded with the motor car, as all horse fairs did. But the name, and the memory, have stayed.
Start at the centre of the Square. The triangular layout of Tinahely is, if you know what to look for, unusual. Most Irish market towns are built along a single long street, or around a rectangular green. Tinahely is a triangle — three converging streets, each meeting at a corner of the Square, with the Courthouse sitting at the apex. That shape is not an accident. It was imposed in the 1780s by the Fitzwilliam family, whose estate at Coollattin, four miles south, owned most of the land around here. The Fitzwilliams were, in the late eighteenth century, landowners of a slightly unusual kind: pragmatic, reforming, interested in making their tenants prosperous because they understood that prosperous tenants paid rent on time. They planned Tinahely like a small engine. Three entry streets. One market space. One courthouse. One church. Efficient.
Look up at the Courthouse. Built in 1843, it is the finest surviving building in the town. Two-storey, cut-stone facade, pedimented central bay — classic Petty Sessions architecture from the period when every Irish market town was given a small courthouse as part of Dublin Castle's project to bring law and order to the countryside. For nearly a hundred and fifty years it served as a working court. Today it is the Courthouse Arts Centre — one of the most active small arts venues in the south-east, hosting theatre, traditional music, visual art exhibitions, and a summer festival that pulls artists from across the country. If it's open, step inside for five minutes. The exposed stone of the original court gallery is still visible above the modern café counter, and the acoustics are, by local legend, some of the best in Wicklow.
Walk up the western side of the Square. The terrace of buildings you pass is Late Georgian — narrow fronts, tall windows, doors with fanlights. Numbers Three, Five, and Seven retain their original ironwork, and Number Nine has a cast-iron boot-scraper at the front step that dates from the 1820s. This was, in the nineteenth century, the commercial heart of the town — a chemist, a draper, a saddler, a general merchant. Today the shopfronts have changed hands and uses many times, but the buildings themselves have survived more or less intact, and the town won a national heritage award in 2019 for the quality of the restoration along this stretch.
Turn left at the top of the Square onto Main Street. On your left, about a hundred metres along, is Madeline's Guesthouse — a beautifully restored nineteenth-century building that now operates as a boutique self-check-in guesthouse. It's where many of the walkers who stay in Tinahely spend the night, including those doing the Wicklow Way, which passes through the town.
Continue west. At the end of Main Street, you come to the Church of the Assumption. Built in 1860, the church is a handsome Gothic Revival building in cut granite, with a tall spire that you can see from almost anywhere in the valley. The stained-glass windows above the altar were made by the Harry Clarke studio in Dublin in the 1920s — Clarke being one of the most important Irish artists of the twentieth century. If the church is open, which it usually is, step inside. Look up. Three Clarke windows. Worth the trip by themselves.
From the church, turn left onto the old fairgreen road. This is the stretch of ground where the horse fair was held — a wide, flat, open area now used as the town's main car park and, in August, as the site of the Tinahely Agricultural Show, which is one of the biggest one-day agricultural events in the country. Twenty-five thousand people come through in a single day. Livestock classes, show-jumping, a vintage tractor parade, trade stands, a craft village, two show-rings, and — without fail — rain at some point in the afternoon. If you're here in early August, stay for it.
Past the fairgreen, the road loops back towards the Square via Fairgreen Lane. Along here, you pass a terrace of small, single-storey workers' cottages — built in the 1860s by the Fitzwilliams to house the estate labourers, and later sold to the occupants in the early twentieth century. Many are still inhabited by descendants of the original families. The cottages are listed as protected structures and retain their original slate roofs, cast-iron ranges, and, in several cases, the small enamel street numbers issued by the estate in 1871.
A word on celebrity, because you asked. Wicklow is sometimes called the Garden of Ireland, and a number of well-known people have made their homes in the county over the decades. The singer-songwriter Chris de Burgh has long been associated with the area around Enniskerry, in the north of the county — a good hour's drive from where you're standing. The actor Daniel Day-Lewis has lived in the Annamoe area, also in north Wicklow, for many years. The television presenter Pat Kenny lives in Dalkey, just across the county line. In Tinahely itself, our celebrities are more local — the long-time postmaster, the auctioneer who has called the horse sales for fifty years, the woman in the hardware shop who can tell you which house every farmer in the valley lives in without blinking. We think ours are better. We're biased.
As you turn back into the Square, you pass the row of small shops that still serve the town day-to-day — the butcher, the supermarket, the pharmacy, the hairdresser, the post office. Most market towns this size in Ireland have lost three or four of these over the past twenty years. Tinahely has kept them. That's not an accident: it's the result of a small, tight community that chooses, again and again, to buy from its own. Walk in. Say hello. Buy something.
Finish your tour at Hanlon's, or at the Bridge Café, or at the Courthouse Arts Centre café — whichever appeals. Order a pot of tea and a slice of brown bread and jam. Watch the Square. Traffic trickles through. A farmer with a trailer of sheep reverses into a narrow lane. A child in a school uniform crosses on a bicycle. A man on a tractor waves at a woman pushing a buggy. That's Tinahely. Thank you for walking with us.