Vale of Avoca, Co Wicklow
First licensed in 1608 as a Coaching Inn on the old Dublin-Wexford highway, the Woodenbridge Hotel became a very popular staging post for merchants engaged in commerce between Dublin and the Southeast.
The hotel came to great prominence during the mining of
gold and copper within the locality and later during Victorian times, when the
quality of its fare and accommodation was said to rival Brighton.
Today Woodenbridge is Ireland’s oldest hotel, but we are
also conscious of the heavy responsibility of living up to 400 years of
continuous heritage and tradition. Each
day we strive to blend the best traditions of yesteryear with the most
professional standards and innovations of the contemporary hotel industry.
On entering the hotel, you are greeted by a very relaxing
residents’ lounge set in the Victorian idiom, which in itself is a veritable
pictorial museum of Irish biographical history. Ramble about and study the portraits and prints of the various
people who shaped the political destiny of the Irish Nation!
_____________________________________________
For centuries the area has been steeped in the evolving history of the Irish Nation.
Thomas Moore
At the meeting of the waters in Avoca, we find the poetically inspirational paradise of Thomas Moore (1779-1852) who composed some of his greatest works beside the confluence of the two rivers.
At Avondale we find the
ancestral home of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the 19th
century Irish Parliamentary Party, who was popularly known as “the uncrowned
king of Ireland” having become the most influential politician of his age in the
British House of Commons.
Across the road from the hotel,
we find the location of John Redmond’s address to the monster meeting of the
Wicklow Volunteers on Sunday 20th 1914, at the outbreak of the Great
War. Redmond who was the legitimate
political successor to Parnell, exhorted all Irishmen to fight the war in
defence of “morality, freedom and religion”
The man who was to have the
greatest influence on the independent Irish State, Eamon De Valera actually
spent his honeymoon at the Woodenbridge Hotel.
The room in which Eamon and Sinead De Valera stayed on their honeymoon
is now named in their honour and is an impressive feature of the hotel.
Michael Collins, the revolutionary
hero of the War of Independence also stayed at the hotel while engaging in
secret meetings with senior British Army officers in February 1922. The room in which Collins stayed can be
booked, subject to availability.
_______________________________________________________
Woodenbridge Hotel,
Vale of Avoca,
Co Wicklow.
Tel: 0402-35146
Fax: 0402-35573
Email: wbhotel@iol.ie