Ancient Web: Victor's Way Kept Its Closed Sculpture Garden in Hyperlinks

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A thirty-year sculpture garden can close its gates in an afternoon. Fortunately, it takes longer to close all the hyperlinks.

Visit the surviving Victor's Way website.

Victor's Way near Roundwood, County Wicklow, Ireland, was the private contemplative garden of Victor Langheld. It is an unusual subject for this collection: the physical site, not the website, was the main creation. But the surviving pages now document a distinctive cultural project that no longer welcomes visitors. The homepage states plainly that the park is permanently closed.

Langheld's own account describes it as a place for adults seeking space to consider difficult changes in their lives. His explanations should be read as the artist's philosophy rather than as established therapeutic science. The writing mixes autobiographical reflection, elaborate metaphysics, and details of what it took to make the sculptures exist.

A park assembled across two continents

According to the site's history, its pieces were conceived in Ireland and carved by artists T. Baskaran and D. V. Murugan in Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu. The long project incorporated black granite and bronze, then continued beyond the original installation with an enormous dung-beetle sculpture named Tiffany and a figure called Druid Finn. Langheld estimates that more than forty years of property acquisition, design, fabrication, travel, and installation cost nearly a million euros. These are the creator's figures, not independently audited accounts.

The sculpture index preserves a wonderfully strange inventory: Awakening, Split Human, Fasting Buddha, Reading Ganesh, Dancing Ganesh, the Birth Canal, the Dying Ferryman, and several musical Ganeshas. It reads like the catalogue of a private mythology made three-dimensional.

Langheld says the park shut permanently on September 28, 2025. His later notice presents the closure as a personal philosophical turning point, and he describes adopting the name Finn. A surviving account of its earlier years also records that the garden had previously closed temporarily before reopening.

The photographs and labels do not recreate a walk through the wooded grounds. They do preserve the work's names, meanings, authorship, and a record of its ending. The Web can serve as the last open gate to something built in the physical world.

Explore the park's sculpture catalogue.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.