Powerscourt Waterfall Walk

Welcome to Powerscourt Waterfall. You're standing at the entrance to one of the most celebrated natural spectacles in Ireland — the highest waterfall in the country, a hundred and twenty-one metres from crest to pool, set in a wooded gorge at the foot of the Powerscourt estate in north Wicklow. The walk around the waterfall is short — about two kilometres in total — but it carries some of the most surprising history on the whole Wicklow walking network. This is not, as the brochures might have you think, just a pretty waterfall. It is a royal site, a cinematic site, and — unusually for Ireland — a place where one of the great tragedies of modern Irish history once happened.

Before we begin, a practical note. Entry is ticketed. There is a small admission fee — paid to the Powerscourt Estate, which owns and maintains the grounds. The car park is large, there are picnic tables, there is a small shop selling coffee and locally-made ice cream, and there are toilets. The waterfall is accessible to wheelchairs as far as the main viewing platform. The steep path up the east side of the gorge is not.

The estate itself is one of the finest in Ireland. The Powerscourt Gardens, about ten minutes drive from the waterfall, have been rated by National Geographic as the third-best gardens in the world. They surround an eighteenth-century house built for Richard Wingfield, the first Viscount Powerscourt, by the German-born architect Richard Cassels. The house burned to a shell in 1974, was partially restored, and is today a combined shopping village, restaurant, and hotel. The gardens escaped the fire and are open year-round.

The waterfall is fed by the Dargle River, which rises on the Sugar Loaf mountain about six kilometres to the south-west. The river carves a spectacular cleft through the Wicklow granite here, and the waterfall itself drops over a band of harder rock that has resisted the erosion happening on either side of it. Waterfalls are, geologically, always retreating — the pool at the bottom is working its way up the cliff, one pebble at a time. In another hundred thousand years or so, Powerscourt Waterfall will be further up the valley than it is today.

Set off along the short paved path to the main viewing area. In winter and spring, when the river is in flood, you can hear the waterfall from the car park. In a dry summer, you may not hear it until you can see it. The flow varies dramatically with rainfall — a summer drought can reduce the waterfall to a thread, and a November flood can turn it into a roaring white curtain fifty metres wide.

The main viewing platform is well-fenced and safe. From here, you get the classic postcard view — the full hundred and twenty-one metres visible from top to bottom, framed by beech trees. In early summer, the trees are in bright new leaf. In October, the same trees turn copper and gold. For photographers, the best light is in the morning, when the sun falls directly onto the face of the waterfall; by afternoon it is in shadow.

A tragedy. In 1968, during the filming of the Walt Disney movie The First Great Train Robbery on the Powerscourt estate, a small number of horses were being trained for a stunt scene. Sean Connery was in the film, as was Donald Sutherland. The filming went well. But during a separate production visit, in September 1974, the young fifteenth Viscount Powerscourt died in a car crash on the grounds, leaving the estate temporarily without a direct heir. Two months later, in November 1974, the main house burned in a fire that started in a flue on the night of a ball. Nobody was hurt. But the eighteenth-century interiors, the paintings, the library, and most of the original furniture were lost. The family, over the following decades, partially rebuilt the shell, but the interiors of the Powerscourt House you can visit today are modern reconstructions.

The waterfall itself features in a number of films. It was used as a stand-in for a waterfall in Vietnam in the 1960s production of The Young Cassidy. It appears briefly in the 1988 film The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Most recently, it was used as a location for Braveheart in 1994, with Mel Gibson filming the opening scenes in the woods below the falls.

For the more adventurous, there is a short steep path up the east side of the gorge that gets you to a higher viewing point — about halfway up the waterfall itself. The path is rough, unmaintained, and involves some scrambling over tree roots and loose stones. In wet weather it is slippery and potentially dangerous. In good conditions, it gives you a view that most visitors never see — the waterfall from a level where the spray reaches you.

A word on the celebrity of the neighbourhood. North Wicklow, in which Powerscourt sits, has long been a preferred home for wealthy Dubliners and people in the entertainment industry. The singer-songwriter Chris de Burgh has long been associated with the Enniskerry area. The late film producer Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks in Doctor Who, lived in the village for many years. The Japanese ambassador to Ireland, traditionally, takes his summer residence in Enniskerry. The village itself — two kilometres from the waterfall — is a nineteenth-century planned estate village, built by the Powerscourt family to accommodate their estate workers, and it remains one of the prettiest villages in Ireland.

Finish your visit with a coffee from the shop by the car park. The Powerscourt estate operates a small farm, and the ice cream — made on-site from estate dairy milk — is some of the best in Wicklow. The shop also stocks locally-made Wicklow products: jams, chutneys, honey, craft beer from the Wicklow Wolf brewery.

Thank you for walking with us. Powerscourt Waterfall is a short walk, but as you've now heard, a deep one. Take your time. Take a photograph. And if you have a full day, follow up with the Powerscourt Gardens themselves — a ten-minute drive, and an absolutely essential stop on any Wicklow itinerary.