Discover Enniskerry

A village composed for an estate, at the gates of Powerscourt

Enniskerry, from the Irish Ath na Sceire, the rugged ford, was largely designed rather than grown. The Wingfield family, Viscounts Powerscourt, laid the present village out from the 1840s to house the people who worked their demesne, and the neo-Tudor terraces around the triangular Square are the signature of that programme. The clock tower in the middle of it went up in 1843, a three-stage granite affair with cast-iron fountain spouts and water troughs at its base and a copper-domed cupola added in 1860, formal and Italianate against the cottage-scale picturesque around it. St Patrick's Church on Church Hill followed in 1861. It is a coherent place because it largely is one programme, by one family, across one generation.

The demesne is still the economic centre of gravity: the house and its forty-seven acres of gardens, a 198-room five-star hotel, two championship golf courses, Avoca filling the ground floor of the house, and Powerscourt Distillery making Fercullen whiskey in the estate's 1730s mill house since 2018. Below the village, in a ravine on the Glencullen River, Knocksink Wood has been a statutory nature reserve since 1994. West is the Glencree valley and the road to the Sally Gap; south, about four kilometres out, the Wicklow Way; east, on every horizon, the 501-metre quartzite cone of the Great Sugar Loaf that the Powerscourt gardeners framed deliberately at the end of the Italian terraces.