Qualla: Avoca, County Wicklow

Avoca, County Wicklow: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ticketautomat (talk), CC BY-SA 2.5. There is no spot in this wide world I love half so much as the Meeting of the Waters - so Thomas Moore wrote in 1808, sitting (the local story goes) beneath a tree at the place where the Avonmore and Avonbeg rivers join to become the Avoca. The stump of that tree is still there. So is the village three kilometres downstream, on the river he made famous, in a Wicklow valley where copper has been mined since 1720 and a brief but bloody gold rush erupted in 1795 on the mountain just above. In the 1990s the BBC drama Ballykissangel turned Avoca's main street into the most-watched fictional Irish village of the decade. Red kites, reintroduced to Ireland in the 2000s, now circle overhead. A small place, a long story.

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Image: Ticketautomat (talk) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Avoca, County Wicklow: Ptolemy Knew This River

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Mischyshyn, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ptolemy, working in Alexandria in the second century, drew a map of Ireland that included a river he called Oboka. He never visited; he was working from sailors' reports. The river he named is almost certainly the Avoca, which means his map preserves the oldest written name for a...

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Image: Joseph Mischyshyn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Avoca, County Wicklow: Copper for Two and a Half Centuries

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JulieBalfe, CC BY-SA 4.0. The pits of East Avoca and their underlying workings supported copper and sulphur production from 1720, and by the 1770s the Avoca mines were shipping more than a hundred tons of copper ore annually from Wicklow harbour. At their peak this was one of the richest copper-mining dis...

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Image: JulieBalfe | CC BY-SA 4.0

Avoca, County Wicklow: Ballykissangel and the Visitors

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ticketautomat (talk), CC BY-SA 2.5. From 1996 to 2001 the BBC filmed six series of Ballykissangel in Avoca, transforming the village street into the fictional Ballykissangel and bringing a flood of visitors. Fitzgerald's pub became Ballykissangel's main pub on screen. The church and the small bridges featured in ep...

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Image: Ticketautomat (talk) | CC BY-SA 2.5

Avoca, County Wicklow: A Village of Notable Residents

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777, Public domain. For a small Wicklow village, Avoca has attracted strange company. George Barret, the eighteenth-century Irish landscape painter, worked here. Oliver Byrne, the nineteenth-century civil engineer who produced a remarkable colour-illustrated edition of Euclid's Elements, was born in...

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Image: Sarah777 | Public domain