Page 34 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

COUNTY WICKLOW'S 'HIDDEN' HERITAGE PARK

County Wicklow's 'Hidden' Heritage Park

Canon Robert Jennings

M
any readers will be very familiar with the excellent Heritage
Park at Ferrycarrig, Co Wexford, where how our ancestors
lived in ancient times can be seen and explored. We can visit
dolmens, cist burials, stone circles, horizontal water mills, fulacht
fiadh (ancient cooking places), a round tower, and so on. Many
of these have been constructed quite recently as they are mere
replicas of the past. Yet here in Co Wicklow, on our own
doorstep, we have many original sites, not replicas. I refer to the
unique and historical landscape of the Sugarloaf Mountain, and
especially Ballyreamon Common and parts of Glassnamullen,
between the old and ‘new’ long hills. In this comparatively small
area of four to five square kilometres there is a unique memorial
to the inhabitants of bygone centuries, going back at least 2,000
years.

In this area alone there are eleven fulacht fiadh, four ring
forts, a bowl barrow, hut sites, earthworks, cairns, crop marks,
St Kevin’s Holy Well, St Molin’s ruined church of the fifth to sixth
century, and ancient trackways. Even in more recent times, it
includes the former Calary point-to-point racecourse, and an old
flat racecourse. Tributaries of two well-known Wicklow rivers, the
Dargle and the Vartry, spring from here – the former flowing north
to Bray and the latter south to Wicklow. Brooding over all of this,
the Sugarloaf Mountain, which the well-known archaeologist
Christiaan Corlett maintains may have been a sacred mountain,
with many ancient burial places so positioned to have a view of
the mountain. (In a similar vein, the Muslims, as we know, face
Mecca three times a day to say their prayers, and all animals
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