Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland: Being a Tourist's Guide to Its Most Beautiful Scenery & an Archæologist's Manual for Its Most Interesting RuinsRussell, Thomas O'Neill
History
Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland: Being a Tourist's Guide to Its Most Beautiful Scenery & an Archæologist's Manual for Its Most Interesting Ruins
Russell, Thomas O'Neill
Ireland -- Antiquities; Ireland -- Description and travel
One great charm of the country around Dublin, like one of the great charms
of Killarney, is its diversity. There are mountain, bay, woodland, and
river. There is a variety of scenery in the immediate vicinity of Dublin
such as cannot be found so near any other European capital, and such as
not even Naples itself can boast of. Great indeed is the difference in the
style of scenery between the cliffs of Howth and the green lanes of
Clontarf, although both places are hardly more than four miles apart. To
go a few miles further from the city, Bray is reached. It is only
twenty-five minutes by train from Dublin. There one finds himself almost
within a gunshot of some of the most picturesque and peculiar scenery in
the world. The Dargle and Powerscourt Waterfall are in the same locality.
They are gems of loveliness that surpass anything of their kind in these
islands. Even Killarney has nothing like them. Their very smallness adds
to their charms. The Dargle is exactly what its name, _Dair-gleann_,
signifies, an oak-glen. It is a chasm some two or three hundred feet deep,
every inch of the sides of which is covered in summer-time with some sort
of tree, shrub, or flower. In its depths laughs or murmurs a limpid stream
that can rarely be noticed, such is the thickness and luxuriance of the
trees and shrubs that overhang it. Powerscourt Waterfall is close by the
Dargle. The river that forms it leaps down a rock nearly three hundred
feet in height, into a valley of brightest verdure, covered with a thick
growth of primeval oak-trees. An enchanting spot--which it is gross folly
to attempt to describe--in a land of towering hills and flower-crowned
rocks. Its wildness, winsomeness, and loveliness must be seen in order to
form anything like a just idea of it. And all within about twelve miles of
Dublin!
Then there is Howth on the north side, and only nine miles from Dublin,
one of the most wonderful spots of earth for its size in Europe. It is a
hill-promontory that juts out into nearly the middle of the bay, about
three miles in width and nearly the same in length. It is over five
hundred feet high, and in autumn is a pyramid of crimson and gold; for
wherever there are not trees or cultivation, there are furze and heath. A
place of wondrous beauty of its own, in no way like the Dargle or
Powerscourt. From the summit of Howth there is one of the most enchanting
and extensive views conceivable, reaching north to the Mourne Mountains
and east to Wales. And all this about nine miles from Dublin! Yet with all
these glories at her very feet, Dublin is still the Cinderella among the
capitals of Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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