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The Wicklow Mountains, so clearly viewed from Dublin, are really round-topped hills, ground down by the Ice Ages, with the occasional freakish shape like the Great Sugarloaf Mountain, where a granite layer has arrested the weathering. Despite their relatively modest height - Lugnaquillia, the highest peak, only just tops 3000ft - they're wild and uninhabited, with little traffic even at the main passes. Given this, and their proximity to Dublin, it's hardly surprising that they were traditionally bandit territory, and that the last insurgents of the land agitation that spread all over Ireland following the French invasion of County Mayo in 1798 hid out here; the mountains were virtually inaccessible until after the ensuing uprisings, when the army built a road to enable them to patrol effectively. This you can still follow, from Rathfarnham in the Dublin suburbs to Aghavannagh, high in the mountains; the Wicklow Way partly follows the road, too. Along with offering some of the east's most wild and desolate landscapes, the Wicklow Mountains shelter a number of powerful historic monuments. The medieval monastic site at Glendalough evokes a sense of the sequestered lives of the Early Christian monks who lived there. Stately Powerscourt House , with its grand facade and its charred yet glorious interior, stands as a fitting symbol for the passing of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and Avondale House, in the intensely pretty wooded valley to the southeast of the mountains, tells the story of one of Ireland's greatest nineteenth-century statesmen, Charles Stewart Parnell.
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