IRELAND, Powerscourt Gardens

SHHHH......THE SECRET CEMETARY

The gardens at Powerscourt are probably the finest in Ireland, both for their design and their dramatic setting at the foot of Great Sugar Loaf Mountain. The house and grounds were commissioned in the 1730’s by Richard Wingfield, the 1st Viscount Powerscourt. Now this name, remember it, I’ll bring it up again when talking about one of the highlights of our entire vacation. The gardens fell into decline, but in 1840 the original plan was revived by the 7th Viscount (Richard Wingfield, the 7th Viscount). It is open to the public now for walking the some 300 acres of meticulously cared for gardens. We spent about 3 hours here, walking down all the many paths which took us to a beautiful Japanese garden, an ancient Rose garden where they were in full bloom for us, an old castle watch tower which you could walk up inside to the top, an old family pet cemetery, and now we come to one of our biggest highlights of our trip: the secret & private cementary of the Wingfield family!!!!!!! As the picture above communicates: Shhhhhhhhh, we weren’t supposed to be there really! But technically there was no sign telling us otherwise. So when Justin discovered this tiny skinny not obvious old trail, off the beaten path, our eager & inquisitive selves mosey’d their way down this inconspicuous path where it lead us to a stone wall, but nothing we couldn’t hop over (see above pic, ha ha). Inside the stone walls was a very very old and grown over small private cemetery. It was in the middle of the woods, where only a few of the many trees were generous enough to allow at least a little bit of sunshine down within to peep its way through over the old woods. We read a lot of VERY OLD tombstones dating back as far as the 1600’s and guess whose we came across…..Richard Wingfield, the 7th Viscount Powerscourt! It was SO COOL!!!! There were also some small ruins in this secret cemetary, perhaps a stone walled chapel resided in this spot at one time. The hour we spent in this secret place in the woods was one of our favorite little adventures of our entire trip. If it sounds creepy to any of you – let me, the person who refuses to watch ANY scary movies, tell you it was NOT, it was like walking back in time and to do so in secret like we did was so cool I can’t even tell you! And we were also, of course, very respectful of this particular hide away. This was justin’s favorite part of the whole trip. We snuck back out of the cemetary and continued on with our walks in the gardens, we came across another cemetary...but this was right on the path and it was a Pet Cemetary of all the family generations pets - even including the family cow "Princess" - ha! After we finished walking the gardens at Powerscourt we made our way to Powerscourt Waterfall then off to Glendalough.

Please click on the orange link below to view our PHOTO SLIDESHOW of additional pics from our POWERSCOURT GARDENS visit

www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=cce4pp5d.4y333yat&Uy=igqs8p&Ux=0&UV=53634812822_999328877605