We Are The Winx!

Derry Day was some steep competition, but Killruddery House and Garden took the prize for best day in Ireland. Just a phenomenal day all over, a perfect end to our fabulous trip. But, we begin at the beginning: Breakfast. I was up at 9:30am and out the door to check out the buffet while Jess stayed behind to begin packing. The buffet spread was pretty consistent with what every other hotel had had so I collected our favourites to bring back, two croissants with butter and jam, four potato toasts (hashbrowns), and two glasses of cranberry juice. The attendant working was lovely enough to get me a tray so I was able to carry all of that the lengthy journey to our room with no trouble! As we munched and crunched we got ourselves all dressed up in our fanciest outfits of the trip, the pink two-piece for Jessica and the blue velvet dress for me, because today was Winx Day!

Jess and I built this trip essentially around fandom things. We went to Derry because of Derry Girls and planned our day around activities based on the show. We went to the Beltane Fire Festival because we’re into Celtic mythology for a number of reasons. For one, we’re of Irish descent so there’s that, but more importantly Celtic myth is woven into several of our favourite things, including Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Prydain (even though that’s Welsh Celtic myth), The Wheel of Time, and Winx Club. Winx Club is especially important because it features twice in this trip! Fate: The Winx Saga, the rightfully poorly received live-action adaptation of Winx Club was partially filmed in Ireland at the Killruddery House and Gardens. Jess and I agree the show was right to be panned, but we also have SUCH fond memories of getting blasted on Four Lokos and eating way too much mac and cheese from a cauldron pot when we watched both seasons. We also talk about the show all the time and have essentially created entirely fictitious plotlines and theories to try and make this show make sense. It’s a favourite past-time of ours, and therefore this show holds a special place in our heart. So, naturally, we had to see Killruddery!

After checking out and packing our things into the car we left our car in the parking lot of the hotel, which seemed like it was ok to do as there was no shortage of parking and we didn’t think anyone would notice, and tried to figure out where the directions on our phone were telling us to walk. It was supposed to be a 12 minute walk from our hotel which was very, very doable for us so we set out and as soon as we left the parking lot saw the sign for Killruddery across the street. We were literally across the street from it and we didn’t know. With that sorted we put the phone directions away and waited for probably the entire estimated 12 minutes trying to cross the street to get onto the path leading into Killruddery. The sidewalk and driveway in run parallel for a little while, but about halfway into the windy entrance the sidewalk shoots off into a little woodland area for a first taste of the natural wonders to come.

The short path through the little forest was just darling, dark and whimsical with children’s fairy doors tapped onto trees throughout. We were getting very excited at that point, joking about Burned Ones in the woods off the path. We followed that path until we reached an opening that led to the entrance. Sort of. There’s a courtyard where a Farm Market is held every Saturday so Jess and I poked our heads into that for a hot second to see what it looked like. There’s also a pizza place and a few other stores but we were too excited to get into the grounds to bother too much with any of that. The official entrance was just past that, a cute little building with a desk for the attendant and some merchandise for sale. A little notebook caught my eye but I decided to wait until we were leaving to make any purchases. Any except the tickets, of course. It was about 10 euro each for access to the grounds, with no access to the house. The house is for tours only, but we didn’t care for a tour as Fate: The Winx Saga did little to no filming inside the building and that was really all we cared about.

The attendant encouraged us to check out the picnic and garden part of the grounds first, which we discovered later was because it’s the only part of the grounds that doesn’t loop around to anywhere so if you don’t make a point to go see it you might accidentally skip it. We took her advice and saw the rows of herbs, fruits, and vegetables, and especially the apple trees from which they make pressed apple juice. Around the apple trees live several colonies of hens! The hens droppings make excellent fertilizer for the trees and the hens fatten up by enjoying the first apples of the season as they drop from the trees. Everyone’s happy! The coffee cart in that part of the grounds wasn’t open, which makes sense as it was a Wednesday, but there were still plenty of people frolicking about the picnic area in the center, eating and lounging and playing with their children in the sand pit!

With that seen and enjoyed we made our way back to where we had entered and went towards the left side to be welcomed officially into Killruddery House and Gardens. From the first second we entered we were overwhelmed with delight. The grounds are gorgeous, of course, but also felt so familiar, so personal to us, if for very silly reasons. We walked straight and then took a direct right into the Beech Hedge Pond, a fountain surrounded by a circular wall of hedges, and were filled with glee to recognize the spot as the place Bloom and Sky meet up in the show, among other scenes. We knew this spot for /sure/ and that only made us more excited for all that awaited us on our journeys through these grounds!

We saw a statue ahead of us as we exited the Hedge Pond but decided to turn onto a different path and found ourselves wandering through The Wilderness. There had been rain early in the day so the ground was still rather muddy but we didn’t mind! We felt very Lizzie Bennet about the matter! We just kept picking random paths until we exited through a clearing onto the Long Ponds and absolutely LOST our mind! It’s the training grounds! The place where the specialists trained and fought over the water, the place where the mind fairies and specialists practiced combining their skills, and we were actually STANDING there! Where they stood! We almost couldn’t stand how excited we were! Lots of pictures later we headed towards the house. We weren’t going to go in, but we could look in some of the windows to see if anything looked familiar. It didn’t really, except maybe the one sunroom full of statues which might have been used as a greenhouse, but we couldn’t be sure. It was fun looking in the windows though and seeing what there was to see. That part of the house is only for guests and tours, but there are parts of the manor that are exclusively for the family that lives there, as the house has been owned and lived in by the same family for 300 years!

As we reached the other side of the house, gasp, we saw it: The entry gates! The gate and driveway into Alfea College! AH! Lost our cool again, did some silly dances of excitement, and took lots of photos. You can’t go down to that gate as it leads to the lived-in parts of the manor, but we were close enough to take some great pictures and recall scenes where the driveway had been featured. After that little bit of glee we wandered to the grounds on the other side of the Long Ponds to see what we could see there. We found a neat little place between some trees that had two weird cauldrons that are probably planters but they felt very magical to us. From there we wound up in a hedge garden designed as something called a Goose Foot. The Goose Foot isn’t a maze, as such, but there are lots of offshoots and paths that lead to dead ends so it was great fun to explore! We’re sure that part of the grounds was used in some training scenes in Fate.

Exiting the Goose Foot found us at a football field called the Bowling Green, which makes sense as the grounds seemed perfect for playing ball, though no one was on it at that time. We went around it the long way to end up at a gate that separates the visiting grounds from the working farm and wondered how much of the land Fate had been allowed to film on. On the other side of the football field, which we’d ended up at, there was a great Lord of the Rings style creepy pathway of trees that we followed to a row of magnolias and some turnip shaped gazebo? Turns out the magnolias and turnip gazebo were dedicated to the Earl of Meath and his wife, Elizabeth, so we took a seat and rested there a moment while we perused the map.

From the map we saw something called The Rock Garden and The Rock and decided to venture onwards and find those places! The Rock Garden ended up being a dark, steep series of paths through a wood that seemed to be where they put any fallen tree parts or broken stonework, which was very interesting actually! We took the path that was at the very furthest point on the grounds, the very border of the tourable Killruddery Grounds, and it was very creepy and very cool and we’re very sure they filmed a Burned One getting impaled there. After reaching what we assumed, because we couldn’t see past the dense trees, was the peak of the path we were walking we found a janky, steep stone staircase down and we had a hoot finagling that. Down in the grounds again we emerged into the light to see how very high we must have been as The Rock, which we discovered we’d been on top up, was basically a tiny mountain on the grounds! 

We went looking for something called the Strawberry Tree that was supposed to have been split when it was struck by lightning but we couldn’t seem to find it as we followed a path back towards Killruddery House. Perhaps we passed it and didn’t know it, but we didn’t see anything that looked like it had been hit by lightning. Nevertheless we wound up back at the house and decided it was time for lunch at the tea house, having spent about two hours wandering about the grounds. The tea house on the grounds is a darling little place set up in an octagonal dairy that never ended up being used as the grounds never held any cows. We ordered a chicken sandwich, a chocolate and caramel cake thing, and a cup of mocha. The chicken was excellent, made from items from the “Garden and the Farm” which I think was a roundabout way to not let guests know they’re eating the chickens they saw earlier in the day aha! The cake was delicious as well and you know what, the mocha was actually great! Not the best I’ve ever had or anything, but certainly the best I’ve had in Ireland! So kudos to them!

After eating we decided we’d like to purchase one of the bottles of pressed apple juice they sell to take to our hotel with us. We thought about waiting until the end to get it, but it wasn’t such a hardship to carry in our messenger bag so we just got it then. From the tea room we spotted a hedge-y part of the grounds we hadn’t seen yet and it turned out to be a Sylvan theater! A totally natural theater that they actually still use for performances and events! How cool is that! We could see the Long Ponds from there so we headed back that way to the fountain at the end to sit on one of the benches and finish our coffee, and that was lovely. It was so zen, sitting there with the fountain going and the birds tweeting, surrounded by so much natural beauty. Well, highly manicured and specifically designed “natural” beauty. But still. Lots of plants.

We took another turn about the grounds after that, finding a weird path in the Goose Foot that felt like a portal to another world, before returning to the Hedge Pond, our favourite place on the grounds for a final lap around as way of saying goodbye. We decided we’d seen everything so we should probably head out. At the entrance/exit I made a formal decision about the little notebook and decided to get it, though they only had the little ones in green and that isn’t either of our favourite colour. Still, it was a pretty little notebook and we wanted something to commemorate our time in this special place, so we got it. With all that under our belt we walked back to our car at the hotel, punched our new hotel by the airport in Dublin into the GPS, and set off wondering why we had to leave such a gorgeous place to return to a city.

Why did we have to leave? Like for real, why were we leaving? What was waiting for us in Dublin? Our hotel, sure, but we didn’t have anything else planned. If we were just going to try and entertain ourselves for the rest of the afternoon and evening then why couldn’t we entertain ourselves lounging about the Killruddery Grounds? We were maybe 5 minutes into the drive when we started questioning it, and started to understand that something in our very marrow knew we couldn’t leave Killruddery yet. We already wanted nothing more than to go back. We had to. So we did! I did a full 360 at the next roundabout we came to and sent us right back to where we’d come from! We cheered and laughed and had a ball recalculating our route to go back to Killruddery and were pulling into the parking lot within maybe 20 minutes of leaving it!

Parked and reinvigorated to have more wonderful times we stopped in to the courtyard officially to have a look about. There was a shop way at the back, we discovered, that was a larger gift shop for Killruddery and guess what we found there? A pink AND purple mini notebook! They only sell green at the entrance but they had several colours to choose from in the official shop! We explained the situation to the clerk at the desk and she was happy to exchange the one green book we’d already bought for one of the notebooks in a color we wanted, so we traded the green for the pink and paid for the purple one and we knew right then, for sure, we were supposed to be back here.

We re-entered the grounds with a degree of heel-clicking glee that should have set off alarms. As the house and hedges came into view we couldn’t believe we’d been stupid and actually left this place when we didn’t have to! The grounds were open until 6pm and we intended to enjoy ourselves as much as possible until we absolutely couldn’t anymore! So, we wandered about the places we’d already been, revisiting the outside of The Rock for a better picture, restrolling around the Hedge Pond because we loved it and so Jess could get a picture in her Other World Tunnel when she found it again, then setting up on a bench outside the house to crack open our bottle of apple juice and have ourselves a treat as we basked! We didn’t stay at the bench for long as we wanted to keep moving locations, keep experiencing new things, and found ourselves lying on the grass Parisian-style before going back to a gnarled tree we thought was cool to sit on and drink our juice. 

When we’d been laying in the grass, however, we’d seen some people emerge from the top of The Rock and we realized there must be a way to the front to get the view that we’d missed by taking the furthest route. Invigorated to find the access point we reclimbed the mini-mountain and indeed discovered the opening to the top of The Rock! And it was gorgeous! A perfect view of the house and grounds and so much more, what an absolute treat we had almost missed! We finished our apple juice up there and admired the place for some time before heading back down to basically wander aimlessly wherever we wanted! We found the Venus statue, took a turn around the house again peering through the windows, and took many, many turns around the fountain in the Hedge Pond because if there’s one thing we love, it’s talking to each other while we walk in circles around a body of water. It’s been that way since we were kids and aided us quite significantly when we became lifeguards. We just love to walk and talk!

At last, 5:30pm rolled around and we had to start finding our way out. We used the bathroom, took our final photos, and said our final goodbyes to this charming place. Except no, we weren’t leaving yet. Jess was sure if we took a little walk we would find the place where the owners cars drove down to the private gate and she was determined to get a photo in front of it so off we set on a little adventure! We walked past the pigs that live on the other side of the driveway and lo and behold she was right! We found it! We probably looked like absolute freaks positioning ourselves strategically between the driveway partitions to keep them out of the shot of us in front of the gate but we GOT the SHOTS! We did it! Mission accomplished!

With that handled we did, actually, finally, leave Killruddery behind. We had a devil of a time hitting a Circle K to fill the tank with diesel as I get nervous about filling unfamiliar cars with gas, but we made it happen and arrived at the Hilton Airport Hotel after an hours drive. We had to park in some off-site parking garage that was murder to get into as you have to pull up to the gate, then get out of the car to hit a button to call reception to have them open the gate then get back in your car and drive through this insanely small little road down into the parking lot. But we survived and checked in then almost immediately headed out to hit the Tesco across the street to find snacks, soda, and some instant pasta we could make with a kettle because we weren’t feeling up to going out for dinner. We also needed some After Sun for our sunburns, which weren’t too bad but could use some care, and a lint roller to use on the car to get it cleaned up before its return. Crossing the street was insane with at least 6 different crosswalks in the one intersection, so that was insane, but we got the hang of how much jaywalking we can do and just followed the pace of everyone else.

Back in the hotel room we showered, put on the kettle, and settled in to eat our pasta, drink some tea and cocoa, and reflect on our last full day here in Ireland. We both agreed today was something magical, something special. I was so glad I decided to turn around and come back, so glad to have had as much time in that place as possible. I hope there’s a heaven, because if it is I know what it’ll be: Jess and I wandering aimlessly about Killruddery House and Garden with a bottle of apple juice that never gets empty, and we never get tired, and the sun never sets.