Climb the keep of 1446 to the battlements at the top

Lie back and kiss the Blarney Stone, hanging upside down over the drop

Find the Druid's Circle, the Witch's Cave and the Wishing Steps in the gardens

Walk down to the lake and see Blarney House, built in 1874

The keep at Blarney, eight kilometres from Cork city, was built by the MacCarthys of Muskerry and dates from 1446, when Cormac Láidir MacCarthy rebuilt it after an earlier castle was destroyed. The Blarney Stone, a block of Carboniferous limestone set into the tower that year, sits among the machicolations at the top, and to kiss it — which is said to give the gift of the gab — you lie back and hang upside down over the drop. Around the castle are extensive gardens with rock formations given fanciful names, the Druid's Circle, the Witch's Cave and the Wishing Steps, and Blarney House, the Colthursts' Scottish baronial mansion of 1874, looks over the lake.

Blarney Castle: Hanging Upside Down for the Gift of the Gab

Blarney and Cork

Cork (Ringaskiddy)

Ten nights in a loop from Cork: Kinsale and Baltimore on the West Cork coast, Garnish Island at Glengarriff, Killarney's lakes, three nights in Dingle with the Blaskets, then Blarney and the English Market.

West Cork and Kerry from Cork

Walk through from the 1862 Princes Street entrance to the Grand Parade

Find the cast-iron fountain at the centre of the market

Buy tripe and drisheen, the dish Cork still eats

Buy fish from the stalls that supply the city's restaurants

There has been a market on this site in the middle of Cork since 1788, when it opened as a meat shambles; the present buildings are mid-19th century, with the ornamental Princes Street entrance built in 1862, and it runs through to the Grand Parade round a cast-iron fountain. It was badly damaged by fire in 1980, rebuilt to an award-winning conservation design, and burned again, less badly, in 1986. It is still best known for its fish and its butchers, supplies many of the city's restaurants, and is where Cork buys tripe and drisheen. Queen Elizabeth II came in 2011 and was served by the fishmonger Pat O'Connell.

The English Market: Cork's Covered Market Since 1788

Find Geraldine Creedon's bronze at Rory Gallagher Place — guitar-shaped on one side, with lyrics from Jinx cast into the other; unveiled at the Jazz Festival in 1997

Find the marker at 27 MacCurtain Street, where he lived above what was then the Modern Bar — the address on his Cavern Club membership card

Find the trail marker on Merchant's Quay where Crowley's Music Centre stood until 2013 — in August 1963 he paid £100 there for the 1961 Stratocaster

Have a drink in the Long Valley on Winthrop Street, open since 1842 and still run by the Moynihans, with the back bar much as it was

Visit the Rory Gallagher Music Library at Cork City Library and find the signed 50th-anniversary Stratocaster in its case

In August 1963, a 15-year-old from MacCurtain Street paid £100 for a second-hand 1961 Fender Stratocaster at Crowley's Music Centre on Merchant's Quay. That guitar — worn to bare wood from 30 years of constant playing — never left Rory Gallagher's hands. Cork City Council named a city-centre plaza after him in 1997 and in June 2025 formally launched the Stompin' Ground walking trail, with stops marking every address in his early life.

Rory Gallagher: The Stompin' Ground

Take the ferry from Cobh to Spike Island, the fortress island in Cork Harbour, once a 7th-century monastery and later a convict depot known as Ireland's Alcatraz

Tour the Fort Mitchel prison on Spike Island, the star fort whose cells held the convicts

Visit the Titanic Experience Cobh in the old White Star Line ticket office, from which 123 passengers boarded Titanic at Queenstown in April 1912

Go into St Colman's Cathedral in Cobh and hear its carillon, Ireland's only one, with 49 bells

Cycle Great Island, the island Cobh is on, on the road over the causeway to Fota Island and Fota House and Arboretum

Cork Harbour is one of the largest natural harbours in the world and the history is stacked up around it. Spike Island began as a 7th-century monastery and became a convict depot so notorious it got called Ireland's Alcatraz; you tour the cells of the star fort begun in 1790 and rebuilt far larger from 1804, renamed Fort Mitchel in 1938. Back in Cobh, the Titanic Experience occupies the actual White Star Line ticket office where 123 passengers boarded the ship at Queenstown in April 1912, and St Colman's above the town has Ireland's only carillon, 49 bells, the largest in these islands. The causeway takes you on to Fota.

Cobh, Spike Island and Great Island by Bike

Find a Sunday score on a country road in west Cork and walk the course with the crowd

Watch a thrower loft the bowl across a corner, and see how the next shot is set up straight

Hold a 28-ounce iron bowl and work out how far you could throw it

Learn how the scoring works — fewest throws over the set course wins

Road bowling — ból an bhóthair, or bullets — is played almost nowhere but Cork and Armagh. Two players take turns hurling a solid iron ball of 28 ounces along a set course of public road, and whoever covers the distance in fewest throws wins. The skill is in the loft — throwing the bowl through the air across a corner instead of letting it run — and in opening the corner, putting it down so the camber leaves the next shot straight rather than stopping in the ditch. Crowds walk the course with the players, bets are laid on individual throws, and cars wait.

Road Bowling: Throwing an Iron Ball Down a Country Road

Walk the ramparts of Charles Fort, the bastion fort built between 1677 and 1682

Find out why the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 ended the Nine Years' War

Find Desmond Castle, the French Prison, in the town, and read its story from the street

Drive or cycle out to the Old Head and look out to where the Lusitania went down

Eat in one of the harbour restaurants of Kinsale

In 1601 a Spanish army landed at Kinsale to join Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell, and the battle outside the town ended the Nine Years' War. The harbour is guarded by two forts: James Fort, a 17th-century pentagonal bastion fort on the Castlepark peninsula, and Charles Fort, a star fort of 1677 at Summercove, partly restored. In town stands Desmond Castle of about 1500, known as the French Prison. Out at the Old Head of Kinsale, 11 nautical miles offshore, the U-20 torpedoed the Lusitania on 7 May 1915 and she sank in about eighteen minutes.

Kinsale: Charles Fort, the Old Head and the Lusitania

Tour the Old Midleton Distillery, now the Jameson Experience

Find the 31,618-gallon pot still, the largest ever built

See the iron water wheel of 1852 still turning

Find out how three rival distillers became Irish Distillers in 1966

The Old Midleton Distillery began as a woollen mill in 1796, was bought by the government in 1803 during the Napoleonic Wars and turned into a barracks, and became a distillery in 1825. The Murphys installed a pot still of 31,618 gallons, so big it had to be assembled on site with the building put up around it, and it is still the largest pot still ever built. An iron water wheel of 1852 still turns there. The old distillery closed in 1975, when a new one was built beside it for Irish Distillers, the merger of Jameson, Powers and Cork Distilleries, and the old buildings are now the Jameson Experience.

Midleton: The Largest Pot Still Ever Built

Go round Derrynane House and find the relics of O'Connell's career

Find the library wing O'Connell built in 1825

Walk across Derrynane beach to Abbey Island at low tide and find the ruined abbey

Climb the stairways inside the walls of Staigue Fort, built around 100 BC

Derrynane House was the home of Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator, and it stands in 120 hectares of parkland on the Kerry coast, with relics of his life and career inside. His grandparents built or extended the house in the 1700s; O'Connell himself built the south wing facing the sea and the library wing in 1825, now the oldest parts that survive. Below it you can walk across Derrynane beach to Abbey Island and the ruined Ahamore Abbey, but only at low tide. Nine kilometres away, Staigue Fort was built in the late Iron Age, probably around 100 BC: a ring of dry stone 27 metres across, with walls up to 5.5 metres high and 4 metres thick, and inside an elaborate network of stairways leading to terraces.

Derrynane: O'Connell's House and Staigue Fort

Go up Loop Head Lighthouse, the tower of 1854, and look out over the mouth of the Shannon

Find out how the first light here, around 1670, was a coal fire on a cottage roof

Walk out to the Bridges of Ross and find the one sea arch the Atlantic has left

Watch for shearwaters and skuas passing the Bridges of Ross in late summer and autumn

Stop in Kilbaha, the last village on the peninsula

Loop Head is the headland on the north side of the mouth of the Shannon, at the end of a long, quiet peninsula with the Atlantic on three sides. The first light here, around 1670, was a stone cottage with a coal fire burning on its roof; a tower followed in 1802, and the present tower took over in 1854. It is one of the lighthouses of the Commissioners of Irish Lights, and visitors can go up it. On the north shore the Bridges of Ross were once a set of sea arches; the Atlantic has left one. In late summer and autumn it is one of the best-known seawatching points in Ireland, when shearwaters, skuas and petrels pass close to the shore on their way south.