Ireland just kept getting better.

I saw Dublin and I liked it there quite a bit.

I saw the Powerscourt Estate and loved it.

And then we found Glendalough, and I can honestly say that it changed my life. Up until that point, Ireland had been a wonderful adventure, and after Glendalough, Ireland was a glorious adventure. But in Glendalough I felt something I don’t fully know how to explain. I suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I was were I was supposed to be— like my soul belonged there. I wrote about that a little bit in a blog I did last year. called “I found my soul’s home in Glendalough.”

That day when we found Glendalough, we crossed a little wooden footbridge into the ruins of a graveyard and a church.

Mom and me standing on the footbridge looking into Glendalough

At the time we were searching for the unknowns of our family lineage, and my parents scoured graveyards looking for headstones with our surname.

While they did that, I walked a little ways away and found a large rock next to one of the lakes (or loughs) that gave Glendalough its name. I sat and wrote in my journal until I couldn’t stay any longer.

In my journal I wrote, “I hope someday I can come back here and sit and write as long as I want. Perhaps I will never go back home and I will find a place here, in the mountains, that will be my new home.”

The place is positively beautiful. There are woods and trails, lakes and streams, and so much green, I could not believe there were that many shades of a color I thought I knew. There is nothing particularly “touristy” about Glendalough, other than its beauty and possibly St. Kevin’s cross.

There is some fascinating history surrounding the place, but when we were there in 1997, I didn’t know any of that. I didn’t have a tour guide or a brochure to tell me of the historical beauty of that space on the globe that suddenly had captivated me in a way I couldn’t express at the time.

The picture I would stare at endlessly to remember that day

The mountains and the lough

In my travels both domestic and abroad I have enjoyed my time and relished in the opportunities that I’ve had to be able to travel to interesting places. However, I have never felt such a strong pull to any place like I felt in Glendalough. Intrigued by my pull to that place specifically, I did some digging in recent years, as much as I could, into the genealogy of my family try to find out if there was some rationale… if truly I felt pulled there because my family was from there. Alas, in all my research the only ties to Ireland I found were in the north of Ireland, nowhere near Glendalough.

However, over the next 19 years I would think about that place often and recognize it in movies – you can’t mistake the glorious slope of the Wicklow Mountains over the wide, reflective lake. And I did go back in 2016 (My Take-Back Year (and a half)), and though I didn’t get to spend the amount of time I’d wanted to on the banks of the lough, it was enough to fuel my spirit on. On my most recent trip back to Ireland, we did not get to Glendalough, but I did find solace for a wounded spirit in Blarney, where next week’s post will take us.