Qualla: Bray, County Wicklow

Bray, County Wicklow: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. On 10 July 1854 the Dublin and Kingstown Railway - the first in Ireland, opened twenty years before - finally reached Bray, and a quiet coastal village began transforming into the favourite seaside resort of nineteenth-century Ireland. A Moorish-style Turkish baths opened in 1859 at a cost of £10,000. Pleasure boats ran in summer. Boarding houses filled with Dublin gentry. Today Bray has 33,512 residents, making it the tenth largest urban area in Ireland, and its history is unusual in that almost every famous resident lived here briefly rather than long. James Joyce as a child. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sheridan Le Fanu as adults. Sinead O'Connor in her last decade. The 2012 Olympic boxing gold medallist Katie Taylor returned home along this seafront to thousands waiting in the rain.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Bray, County Wicklow: On the Edge of the Pale

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AndrewH, Public domain. Bray's location made it strategically important long before it became a holiday destination. During the medieval period, it sat on the southern border of the Pale - the area around Dublin governed directly by the English crown from Dublin Castle - while the countryside inland fel...

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Image: AndrewH | Public domain

Bray, County Wicklow: The Seaside Resort That Almost Was

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert French (1865-1914), Public domain. Bray's Victorian boom should have been bigger. The town developed its esplanade, its handsome cottages ornees, its boarding houses on different scales of economy, and the Parliamentary Gazetteer of 1846 already described it as a favourite resort of wealthy Dubliners and the gentr...

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Image: Robert French (1865-1914) | Public domain

Bray, County Wicklow: Bray Head and Killruddery

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AnaGreysStones, CC BY-SA 4.0. South of the harbour, Bray Head rises from the sea, a mixture of greywackes and quartzite topped with a large concrete cross erected in 1950 for the Catholic Holy Year. A coastal path leads up to the summit. The Cliff Walk runs six kilometres along the railway line around the hea...

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Image: AnaGreysStones | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bray, County Wicklow: Ardmore Studios and the Famous Residents

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Tournesol assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Ardmore Studios, established in 1958, is Ireland's oldest film studio and stands on the western edge of Bray. Excalibur was shot here. So were Braveheart, Breakfast on Pluto, and Neil Jordan's 2012 vampire film Byzantium, parts of which were filmed inside the Bray Head Inn. The t...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Tournesol assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0