Glendalough's round tower rises roughly 30 metres above the valley floor, and its only doorway sits some 3.5 metres off the ground, reached historically by ladder.
The tower is the signature of a monastic city founded in the sixth century by Kevin, a hermit of the Dál Messin Corb, who withdrew to the Upper Lake of Gleann Dá Loch — the valley of two lakes — long before any community gathered around him. Modern Glendalough Wicklow and Kilkenny Full Day Tour tours follow a corridor of Irish history older than Dublin itself.
Kevin died in 618. The settlement he left behind became one of Ireland's principal centres of learning, its Seven Churches drawing scholars and pilgrims across four centuries. Norse raiders struck repeatedly between 775 and 1071. In 1214 the diocese of Glendalough was absorbed into Dublin, and in 1398 English forces out of the Pale burned the valley. Ruin proved slow rather than total. The Gatehouse, the only surviving example of its kind in Ireland, still frames the entrance, and Reefert Church holds the graves of the O'Toole kings.
Kilkenny carries a different weight. William Marshal raised a stone castle above the River Nore around 1195; the Butler family held it from 1391 until 1967, when the sixth Marquess of Ormonde passed the building to the city for fifty pounds. Between those dates the town gave its name to the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366, which sought to bar Anglo-Norman settlers from Irish speech, dress and marriage, and later housed the Confederation of Kilkenny, an Irish parliament of sorts, from 1642 to 1649. St Canice's Cathedral keeps its own ninth-century round tower, the oldest standing structure in the city.
Between the two lies the granite spine of the Wicklow Mountains, a batholith intruded some 400 million years ago and later scraped into corries and ribbon lakes by ice. The Military Road, cut between 1800 and 1809 to flush rebels from the uplands after the 1798 Rebellion, still carries traffic over the Sally Gap and past the dark water of Lough Tay. Dublin day trips to Glendalough and Kilkenny trace that engineering almost exactly. Glendalough Wicklow and Kilkenny Full Day Tour tickets therefore bind three separate Irelands — monastic, Norman and insurgent — into a single line drawn south from the capital, each layer legible in stone that has outlasted the powers that raised it.
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