Or again, if you go from Bray to Greystones by road, you may take
the short road through Windgates and traverse the dip in the ridge
between the Head and the Lesser Sugarloaf--a charming drive--with the
Head and the sea on your left, the peaked shape of Sugarloaf on your
right, bracken and heather clad, and over part of its height enclosed
in a deerpark full of sturdy Japanese deer. You may do better still:
you may take the long road and go inland, leaving Little Sugarloaf
on your left, towering up purple and splendid above you, pineclad
on this side to half its height; then, curving round, come into the
defile by Kilmacanoge, which divides it from the Greater Sugarloaf.
Here now is the parting of the regions. From Kilmacanoge a road
runs up the Rocky Valley, sweeping round Great Sugarloaf, and it
instantly brings you into wildness: in half an hour's going you will
be round the mountain and out on the bleak levels of Calary Bog, with
the soft gradual side of Douse tempting you to run up to the top--an
easy victory. Yield to that temptation, and, unless your way is picked
knowingly, you will be floundering in heather shoulder high, ashamed to
turn back and almost too tired to go on. Still, to go on is worth it.
Once on the top of Douse you are in the heart of real Wicklow--and you
see, far below you, the road winding which leads out through Sallygap,
west of Kippure Mountain to Kildare and the plains.
But supposing that at Kilmacanoge you do what forty thousand other
people will have done that year before you, and hold straight on
between the Sugar-loaves, the road, curving gradually eastward and
seaward, brings you into the Glen of the Downs, another noble defile,
wooded to the very crest with scrubby timber, so close as to be almost
impassable--lovely as the loveliest in its way. Yet somehow the little
gazebo of an octagonal summerhouse set high up on the north side in
Bellevue grounds stamps the scene. It is nature, but nature decked and
laid out and caressed and petted by man. A little farther and the road
brings you into Delgany, at the foot of the sloping Bellevue grounds,
a village prettier even than Enniskerry. And in truth Bellevue was a
splendid type of what I have in mind: place and grounds created in
the eighteenth century by a cultivated Dublin merchant of Huguenot
stock; a house where Grattan was a frequent guest; which till the other
day showed in gathered perfection all the domestic art of that great
period, with its Sheraton and Chippendale sideboards, its marvellous
plaster cornices and ceilings, its inlaid marble mantelpieces, and,
for a final glory, its bedstead painted by Angelica Kaufmann. The
grounds were planned to match--in the same delicate graceful taste, a
little mannered, but always admirable. It had a lovely nature to work
upon, and that same taste has made the seaward fringe of these nearest
Wicklow Hills into the very garden of Ireland. That is the beauty
nearest to the capital.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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