Your Kilkenny and Glendalough Tour Explained
A kilkenny and glendalough tour pairs the monastic valley of Glendalough with the medieval streets of Kilkenny in a single day, crossing the Wicklow Mountains by coach between the two. Most kilkenny and glendalough tour tours follow the Sally Gap or Wicklow Gap road, with stops at the Upper and Lower Lakes, the round tower and graveyard at the monastic city, and free time around Kilkenny Castle and the Medieval Mile. Guides narrate throughout, covering the glacial valley, St Kevin's settlement, and the Nore and Barrow river country you pass through.
St Kevin's round tower at Glendalough rises roughly 30 metres above the valley floor, and its only doorway sits more than three metres off the ground, once reached by ladder alone.
Around it stands a monastic city founded in the sixth century, stripped of its bishopric in 1214 and quarried for stone for centuries afterwards. Travellers asking where Glendalough is in Ireland are directed to a glacial valley in the Wicklow Mountains, roughly an hour south of Dublin, where two lakes sit beneath the shoulders of Camaderry and Lugduff.
A Kilkenny and Glendalough tour exists because two unlike medieval survivals lie within a single day's driving. The Wicklow valley preserves early Christian Ireland in stone: the double-arched gatehouse, the roofless cathedral, the Priest's House, and St Kevin's Kitchen with its miniature belfry. Kilkenny, ninety kilometres south on the River Nore, preserves the Norman city — a castle held by the Butlers for close to six hundred years, the Black Abbey, and St Canice's Cathedral beside its own round tower. Operators sell the pairing under many names: the kilkenny wicklow and glendalough tour from dublin, the glendalough wicklow and kilkenny day tour from dublin, and the kilkenny wicklow and glendalough tour & sheepdog show, which folds a working hill farm into the itinerary.
The road matters as much as the endpoints. Coaches cross the Wicklow Gap or the Sally Gap, over blanket bog and past Lough Tay, the dark corrie lake below the Luggala estate. Guided kilkenny and glendalough tour tours also take in the visitor centre exhibition, where a scale model reconstructs the settlement in timber and thatch, before the path drops to the Lower Lake and the ruins proper. Adult admission to the monastic site and visitor centre is 5 EUR.
What survives here is not scenery alone. The high crosses, the Romanesque doorway of the Priest's House, and the corbelled stone roof of St Kevin's Kitchen record a building tradition that predates the Normans by four hundred years, while Kilkenny's black limestone — cut, polished and still underfoot in the Medieval Mile — records what came after. Where kilkenny and glendalough tour tickets once meant a coach seat and a guidebook, they now cover interpretation, waymarked lakeside paths and the sight of two round towers in a single Irish summer day.
9 hr
