There’s nothing much to WICKLOW, seventeen miles south of Bray, but it is the first place that wholly escapes the influence of Dublin as you go down the coast. It’s a pleasant, ramshackle town with plenty of entertainment, one or two good, cheap places to eat, a couple of smarter places on the fringes of the town, and walking and swimming, too. It has none of the presence you might expect of a county town and comes across as a happily disorganized kind of place, full of people chatting on pavements, cars parked on double yellow lines and solidly built houses in bright marine pastels.