Overview
The Cloghoge drains the most remote corner of the Wicklow Mountains. It rises on the slopes of Tonduff Mountain near the Sally Gap and is the Avoca system’s furthest-flung headwater, 42 km from the sea as the crow flies, feeding Lough Tay and then Lough Dan – the largest natural lake in County Wicklow. All of it lies inside the privately owned Luggala (Guinness) Estate, and there is no public right of way through the valley. This page is here for what the place is, not as a walk to plan.
What you can see of it, you see from the road: the Lough Tay viewpoint on the R759 hands you the lake and its pale beach from public ground, and it’s usually busy for exactly that reason.
History & background
The valley was once heavily settled, and the evidence is still underfoot. Stone walls and cottage foundations line the riverbanks; near where the Cloghoge spills into Lough Dan, a white-washed cottage ruin still stands on the gorse-clad bank, sheltered by a mature sycamore. Archaeologist Dr Chris Corlett has called the valley ‘the largest example of a fossilised 18th/19th-century farming landscape in Wicklow, if not the country’. Local history offers two explanations for the abandonment: the reprisals after the 1798 rebellion, or the depopulation of the Famine years in the 1840s. Today the fields are grazed by red deer, and the loudest thing is usually the wind.
The valley also has a place in the history of Irish hill walking. J. B. Malone, who mapped and promoted the Wicklow routes in the early 20th century and laid out much of what became the Wicklow Way, is remembered by a memorial above the Lough Tay viewpoint.
The geology is easy to read along the banks: as far as Lough Tay the bedrock is mainly schist, but above that, up to the source on Tonduff, it’s the Wicklow granite, the largest granite exposure in north-west Europe, which gives the range its rounded shoulders. The river’s clear, oxygen-rich water supports a healthy population of wild trout, and red deer graze the open glens.
Access
The Cloghoge valley is private property from end to end, and there is no public right of way along it. Route descriptions for the valley circulate on walking sites; the landowners do not permit that access, and we no longer publish it.
The valley is part of a Special Area of Conservation and Special Protection Area, and the archaeology in it — the field walls, the cottage ruins, the bullaun stone — is unprotected from casual foot traffic in a way that a fenced monument is not.
Where to walk instead
- Glendalough – waymarked trails through a comparable glacial valley, all on public ground.
- The Wicklow Way – the waymarked long-distance route passes along the ridge to the east.
- Glenmacnass Waterfall – a roadside stop on the Military Road, a few kilometres south.
- Lough Bray – a short walk in to another glacial lake off the R115.