Wednesday Season 3 Locations: Wicklow & Powerscourt, Ireland

Netflix renewed Wednesday for a third season on July 23, 2025, and by spring 2026 production had moved into Ashford Studios in County Wicklow — the same complex where Vikings built its Scandinavian world and Ridley Scott shot The Last Duel. Season 2 had already relocated the show out of Romania: its two parts aired across 2025, shot, per Tourism Ireland’s own campaign, at Powerscourt House in Wicklow, Charleville Castle in Offaly and Deansgrange Cemetery in Dublin. Season 3 is being made the same way, with a summer 2027 premiere targeted and one big difference for travelers: this is the first season whose Nevermore Academy exteriors sit at a real, visitable, ticket-selling estate.

That matters if you’re planning a trip now, because almost everything Wednesday is using was there long before the cameras arrived. Powerscourt has been open to the public for decades; Glendalough’s monastic valley is free to walk; the mountain roads around Sally Gap are public land. The show is the latest in a four-decade line of productions that have made Wicklow Ireland’s “Hollywood of the East” — and unlike most set-jetting destinations, you can visit nearly every location before a single episode airs. Here’s what’s real, what’s open, what’s worth your day, and which tours actually make sense.

Powerscourt Estate: The Real Nevermore Academy

Powerscourt began as a 13th-century castle built by the Anglo-Norman La Poer family — later anglicised to Power — to control the valleys of the Dargle, Glencree and Glencullen rivers. The Wingfield family took over in the early 1600s, and in the 1730s the 1st Viscount Powerscourt commissioned the German architect Richard Cassels to rebuild the medieval stronghold into the Palladian mansion you see today, completed in 1741 with its signature circular domed towers. A fire gutted the house in 1974; it was painstakingly restored and reopened in 1996, and the Slazenger family has owned the estate since 1961. The result is one of Ireland’s most photographed facades — and now, per the production’s Irish shoots, the exterior of Nevermore Academy itself.

The 47 acres of gardens are the real draw, and they’re a screen-set in their own right. The 7th Viscount, who spent 20 years laying them out in the second half of the 19th century, took inspiration from Versailles and Schönbrunn: there’s a formal Italian Garden, a walled garden, a Japanese garden, a pet cemetery and the ornamental Triton Lake, which National Geographic ranked the estate’s gardens number three in the world in 2014. Filming at Powerscourt predates Wednesday by half a century — Barry Lyndon shot here before the 1974 fire, Excalibur staged its Arthur-versus-Lancelot duel at the estate’s waterfall, The Count of Monte Cristo filmed in the grounds, the Jurassic World short Battle at Big Rock used the demesne, and Disenchanted dressed the house’s ballroom as Malvina Monroe’s residence.

For visitors, the house’s ground and first floors are open as exhibition and retail space (much of the interior is privately used, which is why on-screen dorm scenes are built on soundstages rather than filmed upstairs), and the gardens are ticketed separately from the waterfall. The 121-metre Powerscourt Waterfall — the second-highest in Ireland — sits about seven kilometres from the house through the estate’s deer park, with its own entry fee around €7.50 for adults. Between the house, the gardens and the waterfall, this is comfortably a half-day stop on its own.

Wicklow: Ireland’s “Hollywood of the East”

County Wicklow has been Ireland’s film backlot since 1958, when Ardmore Studios opened in Bray — the country’s first purpose-built film studio, home over the decades to My Left Foot, Angela’s Ashes and countless television productions. Ashford Studios arrived in 2012 as a purpose-built television complex, and it’s the one carrying Wednesday Season 3 right now: RTÉ and The Irish Times both reported in August 2026 that Season 3 was filming there alongside the Viking drama Blood Axe, and that a plan to double the studio’s size had just been rejected by Wicklow County Council — an ironic bottleneck, since the county’s screen boom is exactly what created the demand.

Why do productions keep choosing Wicklow? Geography is the honest answer. Dublin’s airport and city center are 45 minutes from the mountains; the county compresses coastline, lakes, forest and bare upland into a single hour of driving; and Ireland’s Section 481 tax credit gives film and television productions a 32% corporation tax offset, with a regional uplift that ran from 2019 to 2023. The economics are concrete: The Irish Times reported that the co-production company behind Wednesday’s second season received corporation tax credits of between €20 million and €60 million. Screen Wicklow, the county’s film office based at Clermont House in Rathnew, is a single point of contact for location permits — the same model that has turned Northern Ireland’s own screen infrastructure into the Game of Thrones location economy around Belfast.

The County Wicklow Locations You Can Visit Right Now

Beyond Powerscourt, the locations Wednesday inherits are the same ones Braveheart, Excalibur and Vikings used — and they’re all public. Glendalough, an hour south of Dublin, is the headline: a glacial valley whose 6th-century monastic settlement, founded by St Kevin, survives as Ireland’s most complete early-medieval site, anchored by a 30-metre round tower. The Monastic City is free to enter; the two lakes, the forest walks and the Spinc ridge hike above the Upper Lake are the reason tour itineraries keep coming back. The valley floor is where most coach tours land, but the trail up the southern ridge is where you’ll understand why a production scout sees Scotland, Scandinavia or anywhere cold and old in this one valley.

Up on the R759, Sally Gap is a 500-metre mountain pass crossing the spine of the Wicklow Mountains — the moorland where Braveheart staged its Battle of Stirling scenes, and a road that rewards a slow car with views in every direction. A few minutes east sits Lough Tay, the dark lake the Guinness family’s Luggala estate overlooks, whose white sand beach gives it the “Guinness Lake” nickname — and which stood in for Kattegat through Vikings’ first seasons, filmed almost entirely in County Wicklow. Both are viewpoints rather than managed attractions: park considerately, keep to the road edges, and you’re looking at the same frame as the show.

One more way to see the mountains at a pace that has nothing to do with a bus timetable: the Wicklow Mountains Horseback Trekking trail rides from a stable in the foothills, on routes that cross the same open upland the productions use. It’s not a tour of film spots — it’s the landscape without the diesel.

Dublin’s Film Connections and the Irish Screen Trail

Dublin is where the trip starts and ends, and it has its own Wednesday connections. Season 2 filmed at Deansgrange Cemetery in the city’s south suburbs — a location that will ring a bell for anyone who remembers the show’s graveyard scenes — and the production’s Irish base was Dublin itself, while Charleville Castle, 90 minutes west in Offaly, supplied additional exteriors. In the city center, the Irish Film Institute sits in Temple Bar as the national cultural cinema and archive: three screens of independent and classic film, a café, and the free IFI Archive Player for Irish screen history online. If you want to understand why Ireland keeps landing these productions, an afternoon at the IFI plus a walk through Temple Bar’s film-flavored pub quarter is the honest, non-touristy version of the screen trail.

The country is leaning into the connection deliberately. Tourism Ireland spent €200,000 on a Wednesday marketing campaign timed to Season 2’s release — small change by global standards, but a signal that the state sees the show as tourism infrastructure, not just content. It’s the same playbook that turned Dubrovnik’s Game of Thrones filming sites into a managed walking-tour economy, and the same post-finale set-jetting logic that keeps Stranger Things’ Georgia trail drawing visitors years after filming wrapped. Ireland’s version is younger, but the locations were already here — that’s the difference. Expedia’s 2026 travel report found 81% of Gen Z and Millennial travelers now plan trips around on-screen locations, and Wicklow is one of the rare destinations where you can do it before the show even premieres.

Planning Your Trip: Getting to Wicklow, Timing, and Budget

The logistics are simple, with one honest caveat: the best-known locations cluster around two hubs that don’t have great public transport between them. Powerscourt is 45 minutes from Dublin by car (exit the M11 at Enniskerry), and Glendalough is another 40 minutes south through the mountains; Sally Gap and Lough Tay sit on upland roads where a rental car is effectively required. Without a car, take the DART train to Bray and a taxi or local bus to Enniskerry for Powerscourt, and accept that Glendalough is far easier by tour coach or rental. That’s the real argument for the day tours — they solve the transport gap, not just the itinerary.

Timing matters more than you’d think. May through September is the dependable window: long evenings, warmer lows, and the Wicklow Way and Glendalough trails fully open. Early May and late September split the difference between decent weather and manageable crowds; July and August are busy at Glendalough’s car park by mid-morning, so go early or book a tour that does. And if you’re timing a trip to the show itself: production runs through 2026 at Ashford, the premiere is targeted for early summer 2027, and the gap between wrap and release is the sweet spot — the locations open again, and the hype hasn’t peaked.

• Book Powerscourt's gardens in advance in summer — the house and garden tickets are separate
• Carry rain gear year-round; the mountains make their own weather even in August
• Sally Gap and Lough Tay are roadside viewpoints: park considerately, never block the gate lanes
• Don't approach Ashford Studios while Season 3 is in production — it's an active set
• Check Screen Wicklow's notice pages before driving a specific valley road for filming closures

For lodging, the pragmatic move is to pick one base and commute. Enniskerry puts you at Powerscourt’s gates in a village of pubs and cafés, but it’s quiet after dark. Bray is the better small-town base: seaside promenade, DART link to Dublin’s city center in 40 minutes, and Ardmore Studios at the edge of town. Dublin itself works fine if you’re taking tours — every itinerary in this guide departs from the city and returns the same evening. If you want the day shaped around your own timing rather than a coach’s, the private options below are the two worth knowing about; the difference between them is scale and pace, not locations covered.

Wednesday Season 3 will bring its own crowds when it lands in summer 2027 — but the locations were never the show’s. They were Wicklow’s first, and they’ve been handling film crews since 1958. Go before the premiere, walk the same ridge above Glendalough, stand at the fountain in front of the real Nevermore, and you’ll have seen the season before the rest of the internet does.

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