Derrynane. Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Dublin
Population: 5.5 million+
Language: English/Irish
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1 – Ring of Kerry & Slea Head Drive
The Ring of Kerry is a roughly 180 km scenic loop around Kerry’s Iveragh Peninsula, threading mountain passes, Atlantic coast and the lakes of Killarney National Park, while the Slea Head Drive is a circular coastal route of about 40 km on the neighbouring Dingle Peninsula.
On the Ring of Kerry, see Staigue Fort, Daniel O’Connell’s home at Derrynane, Muckross House, the Gap of Dunloe and Ladies View, and on the Slea Head Drive stop at Gallarus Oratory, the beehive huts at Fahan and Dunquin Pier, the ferry point for the Blasket Islands.
Charlie Chaplin loved Waterville on the Ring of Kerry so much that he holidayed there for about ten summers and has a bronze statue on the seafront, and Coumeenoole Beach on the Slea Head Drive featured in Ryan’s Daughter.
2 – Croagh Patrick
Croagh Patrick is a near-perfect quartzite cone rising 764 m above Clew Bay in County Mayo, a Christian pilgrimage site for some 1,500 years, and some archaeologists argue it was sacred long before that.
On Croagh Patrick, climb to the small summit chapel where St Patrick is said to have fasted for 40 days, traditionally in 441, as thousands do on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July, some of them barefoot.
Twice a year, on 18 April and 24 August, the setting sun seen from the Boheh Stone appears to roll down the slope of Croagh Patrick, which may have inspired the stone’s Neolithic carvings, and gold found in the mountain in the 1980s was never mined after local opposition.
3 – Newgrange
Newgrange is a passage tomb in County Meath’s Boyne Valley, built around 3200–3100 BC, which makes it about 500 years older than both Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza.
At Newgrange, the centrepiece of the Brú na Bóinne UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside Knowth and Dowth, walk the 19 m stone passage and see the spiral-carved kerbstones, reached via the visitor centre.
At dawn on the winter solstice, sunlight pours through a roof-box at Newgrange and fills the inner chamber for about 17 minutes, and demand to be inside is so high that places are given out by lottery.
4 – Cliffs of Moher
The Cliffs of Moher are a 14 km wall of layered sandstone and shale on the County Clare coast, plunging up to 214 m into the Atlantic, laid down in an ancient river delta some 320 million years ago.
At the Cliffs of Moher, walk the cliff paths to O’Brien’s Tower, built in 1835 by Sir Cornelius O’Brien, watch for puffins on Goat Island, and on a clear day take in the Aran Islands and Connemara’s mountains.
The Cliffs of Moher have starred on screen as the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride and, with some digital help, in the Horcrux cave scenes of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
5 – Kylemore Abbey
Kylemore Abbey is a neo-Gothic castle mirrored in a lake in the Connemara mountains of County Galway, built from 1867 by the politician Mitchell Henry, and a Benedictine abbey since 1920.
At Kylemore Abbey, tour the restored castle rooms, the lakeside church known as the “cathedral in miniature” and the six-acre Victorian Walled Garden, then wander the lakeshore and woodland walks.
Kylemore Abbey began as a grand romantic gesture, as Henry built it for his wife Margaret and, after she died suddenly in 1874, raised the church in her memory with marble from all four provinces, and the Benedictine nuns who bought it in 1920 had been shelled out of their abbey at Ypres in World War I.
6 – Limerick
Limerick is Ireland’s third-largest city, founded by Vikings in the 10th century where the River Shannon widens into its estuary, with a medieval quarter clustered on King’s Island.
In Limerick, see King John’s Castle, begun around 1200, the Treaty Stone that gave the “Treaty City” its name after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, St Mary’s Cathedral, founded in 1168, and the eclectic Hunt Museum.
Limerick is immortalised in Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes, later a film starring Emily Watson, and in World War II the flying-boat base at nearby Foynes linked Europe and America, where Irish coffee was first served in 1943.
7 – Connemara
Connemara is the wild western reach of County Galway, a land of bog, quartzite peaks and Atlantic inlets, and part of Ireland’s largest Gaeltacht, where Irish is a community language.
In Connemara, hike the Twelve Bens, partly within Connemara National Park, cruise Killary Harbour, often called Ireland’s only fjord, and visit the village of Roundstone.
Connemara and nearby Cong provided the backdrop for the 1952 classic The Quiet Man, Leenane starred in The Field, and in 1919 Alcock and Brown ended the first non-stop transatlantic flight nose-down in a Connemara bog near Clifden.
8 – Dublin
Dublin grew from a Viking settlement on the River Liffey, founded in 841, took its name from Dubh Linn, the “black pool”, and has been Ireland’s seat of power since the 12th century.
In Dublin, visit Trinity College and the Book of Kells, the Guinness Storehouse, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Kilmainham Gaol, the Garden of Remembrance and the 1916 Easter Rising landmarks on O’Connell Street.
Dublin is a UNESCO City of Literature and home of Wilde, Yeats, Beckett and Joyce, whose Ulysses unfolds across a single day, 16 June 1904, celebrated as Bloomsday, and on 31 May 1941 German bombs on the North Strand killed 28 people in neutral Ireland.
9 – Skellig Michael
Skellig Michael is a jagged pinnacle of rock about 12 km off the Kerry coast, where monks founded a monastery between the 6th and 8th centuries, and it’s been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.
On Skellig Michael, climb roughly 600 ancient stone steps past seabird colonies to the cluster of dry-stone “beehive” huts near the summit.
The beehive huts on Skellig Michael have withstood Atlantic storms for more than a thousand years without mortar, George Bernard Shaw called it “an incredible, impossible, mad place”, and it became Luke Skywalker’s hideaway in the Star Wars sequels.
10 – Rock of Cashel
The Rock of Cashel is a spectacular cluster of medieval buildings crowning a limestone outcrop above the Tipperary plain, for centuries the seat of the Kings of Munster before it was given to the Church in 1101.
At the Rock of Cashel, explore the round tower, the roofless Gothic cathedral and Cormac’s Chapel, home to Ireland’s only surviving Romanesque frescoes.
Brian Boru was crowned King of Munster at the Rock of Cashel in the late 970s, and legend says St Patrick baptised King Aengus here and accidentally speared the king’s foot with his crozier, the king saying nothing because he thought it was part of the ritual.
11 – The Burren
The Burren is a vast, lunar-looking expanse of cracked limestone pavement in County Clare, its name coming from the Irish boireann, “rocky place”, and farmers have shaped it for some 6,000 years.
In the Burren, visit Poulnabrone dolmen, used for burials from around 3800 BC, Caherconnell stone fort and Aillwee Cave, among dozens of megalithic tombs.
Arctic and Mediterranean wildflowers bloom side by side in the Burren’s crevices, a Cromwellian officer repeated the saying that it had “not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him”, and Father Ted fans visit Glanquin farmhouse, the real Craggy Island parochial house.
12 – Fanad Head Lighthouse, Donegal
Fanad Head Lighthouse stands on a rocky Donegal headland between Lough Swilly and Mulroy Bay, first lit on St Patrick’s Day, 1817, after the frigate HMS Saldanha was wrecked nearby in 1811 with the loss of about 250 lives.
At Fanad Head Lighthouse, climb the tower’s 76 steps for sweeping Atlantic views, tour the keepers’ quarters, or stay overnight in the restored cottages.
Local legend says the Saldanha’s parrot was the only survivor, found wearing a collar bearing the ship’s name, and Lough Swilly below Fanad Head was the last of the Treaty Ports Britain handed back in 1938, helping Ireland stay neutral in World War II.
13 – West Cork
West Cork is Ireland’s relaxed south-west corner of rugged peninsulas, harbour towns and gardens warmed by the Gulf Stream, and in 1796 a French fleet carrying Wolfe Tone was driven out of its Bantry Bay by storms.
In West Cork, tour Bantry House and its Italian gardens, the island oratory at Gougane Barra and Mizen Head, one of Ireland’s wave-battered south-western extremities, and look out to Fastnet Rock, “Ireland’s Teardrop”.
West Cork is Michael Collins country, as the revolutionary was born near Clonakilty and killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth in 1922, a life dramatised in Neil Jordan’s 1996 film Michael Collins.
14 – Glendalough
Glendalough, Gleann Dá Loch, “the valley of the two lakes”, is a 6th-century monastic city founded by St Kevin in a glacial valley in the Wicklow Mountains.
At Glendalough, wander the 30 m round tower, St Kevin’s Kitchen, the ruined churches and the ancient graveyard, then hike to the Upper Lake and St Kevin’s Bed, a cave in the cliff face.
Legend says Glendalough’s founder, St Kevin, held his hand out so motionless that a blackbird nested in it, a story the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney turned into his poem “St Kevin and the Blackbird”.
15 – Kilkenny
Kilkenny is a medieval city of narrow lanes on the River Nore, and in the 1640s it was effectively Ireland’s capital as the seat of the Confederation of Kilkenny.
In Kilkenny, walk the Medieval Mile from Kilkenny Castle, the Butler family’s seat for nearly 600 years, to St Canice’s Cathedral and its climbable round tower.
Kilkenny staged Ireland’s first recorded witchcraft trial in 1324, when the wealthy widow Dame Alice Kyteler was accused of sorcery and fled abroad while her maid Petronilla de Meath was burned at the stake, and Kyteler’s Inn carries her name.
16 – Aran Islands
The Aran Islands are three windswept limestone islands at the mouth of Galway Bay, where Irish is the first language and traditional island life carries on.
On Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, see Dún Aonghasa, a prehistoric stone fort more than 3,000 years old, perched on the edge of a sheer cliff nearly 90 m high with no barrier.
The Aran Islands gave their name to the hand-knitted Aran sweater, inspired J.M. Synge’s play Riders to the Sea and Robert Flaherty’s 1934 film Man of Aran, and stood in for the fictional island in The Banshees of Inisherin.
17 – Hill of Tara
The Hill of Tara in County Meath was the legendary seat of Ireland’s High Kings, where United Irishmen were defeated in 1798, and its oldest monument, the Mound of the Hostages, is a passage tomb built around 3300–3000 BC.
On the Hill of Tara, walk the earthworks of Ráth na Ríogh, the royal enclosure, to the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny, said to roar when touched by the rightful king, and look into the Mound of the Hostages.
The Hill of Tara drew hundreds of thousands, reputedly up to a million, to Daniel O’Connell’s “monster meeting” in 1843, and from 1899 to 1902 British Israelites dug into it looking for the Ark of the Covenant, despite protests from Douglas Hyde, W.B. Yeats and George Moore, and found nothing.
18 – Cobh and Spike Island
Cobh, known as Queenstown from 1849 after Queen Victoria’s visit, was the port where about 2.5 million Irish emigrants set sail between 1848 and 1950, and Spike Island in its harbour was a convict prison from 1847, probably the largest in the British Empire for a time.
In Cobh, see St Colman’s Cathedral and its 49-bell carillon, the statue of Annie Moore, who sailed from here to become the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island in 1892, and the Lusitania graves in the Old Church Cemetery, then cross to Spike Island’s star-shaped Fort Mitchel.
Cobh was the Titanic’s last port of call on 11 April 1912, where 123 passengers boarded and 44 of them survived, and Spike Island was the first of the Treaty Ports Britain handed back, on 11 July 1938, keeping it in Irish hands through neutral Ireland’s World War II.
19 – Drumcliffe and Benbulben
Drumcliffe, in County Sligo, grew around a monastery traditionally founded by St Columba in the 6th century, beneath Benbulben, a flat-topped limestone mountain carved by glaciers.
At Drumcliffe, see the round-tower stump and the high cross, the only one in Sligo, then visit W.B. Yeats’s grave in the churchyard with Benbulben rising behind it.
W.B. Yeats died in France in 1939 and was reburied at Drumcliffe in 1948 under his own epitaph, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”, though French papers suggest his remains were mixed with others’ bones, and six anti-Treaty IRA men were killed on Benbulben during the Civil War in 1922.
20 – Achill Island
Achill Island in County Mayo is Ireland’s largest island, linked to the mainland by the Michael Davitt Bridge since 1887, and for generations its young people left each year for seasonal work in Scotland.
On Achill Island, walk among the 80 to 100 stone houses of the Deserted Village at Slievemore, swim at Keem Bay, and see Kildavnet tower house, linked to the pirate queen Grace O’Malley.
Achill Island has drawn artists from Paul Henry to the German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, whose cottage at Dugort is an artists’ residence, and its railway’s first and last trains are said to have carried the dead home, the victims of the Clew Bay drowning of 1894 and of the Kirkintilloch bothy fire of 1937.