Go round Portumna Castle and walk the corridor that runs its whole length

Walk the Lough Derg shore in Portumna Forest Park

Watch the swing bridge over the Shannon open for boats

Find the old Famine workhouse on the edge of the town

Portumna, Port Omna, the landing place of the oak, is where the Shannon opens into Lough Derg, on the crossing between Galway and Tipperary. Portumna Castle was built in the early 17th century by Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde, Lord President of Connacht — a semi-fortified house rather than a castle, with a three-metre corridor running its whole length — and was abandoned after a fire in 1826; its walled gardens survive. Beside it lies Portumna Forest Park. The bridge over the Shannon still swings open for boats, and the town's Famine workhouse stands on the edge of the town.

Portumna: The Earl's House on Lough Derg

Take a sailing lesson from Dromineer, home of Lough Derg Yacht Club since 1835

Try stand-up paddleboarding in Dromineer Bay

Find the ruined tower house on the harbour

Find out why a lake needs a lifeboat, at the RNLI station in the harbour

Dromineer lies on the shore of Lough Derg, eight kilometres north-west of Nenagh, and has sailed the lake since 1835, when Lough Derg Yacht Club was founded here — one of the oldest yacht clubs in the world. Its harbour is overlooked by an ivy-clad ruined tower house, begun as a 13th-century hall house and converted in the 15th or 16th century. It is also home to the Lough Derg lifeboat, the first inland lifeboat station in the Republic of Ireland. The bay is sheltered enough for a first sailing lesson or a paddleboard.

Dromineer: Sailing Lough Derg's Oldest Waters

Walk out to Cromwell's Castle, Cromwellian in origin from 1653 and rebuilt as a gun position in the Napoleonic wars, still standing over the Shannon crossing

Find the Salt Battery — Fort Eliza — with its emplacements for four cannons, and the Martello tower

Walk the harbour and the marina on the Shannon

Find Charlotte's Way, the house once called Hill House, where Charlotte Brontë's widower lived out his life, and the house Trollope lodged in

Banagher sits on one of the very few crossings of the mid-Shannon, and it is fortified out of all proportion to its size. Cromwell's Castle, built in 1653, still stands controlling the river; so do the Salt Battery — Fort Eliza — with emplacements for four cannons, Fort Falkland, and a 19th-century Martello tower, all of them put there to hold one bridge. Anthony Trollope lived here in the 1840s, and Arthur Bell Nicholls came back to Banagher after the death of his wife Charlotte Brontë and lived at Hill House until 1906.

Banagher: The Shannon Crossing and Cromwell's Bridgehead

Stand under the restored Leviathan, the largest telescope on Earth in 1845

Find Mary Rosse's darkroom in the science museum

Cross the wrought-iron bridge of 1820, said to be the oldest in Ireland

Walk the walled gardens and find the 300-year-old box hedges

The 3rd Earl of Rosse built the great telescope at Birr, and when it was finished in 1845 it was the largest on Earth, able to see further into space than any before it. His son, the 4th Earl, measured the heat of the moon. After 1908 the telescope fell into disrepair, the mirror went to the Science Museum in London and the iron frame was melted down around 1914 for the war; it was restored in the late 1990s, and you can stand under it again. The castle is still the Earl's home, but the demesne is open: a science museum with Mary, Countess of Rosse's darkroom, thought to be the oldest surviving in the world, a wrought-iron bridge of 1820, said to be the oldest in Ireland, and box hedges more than 300 years old in the walled gardens.

Birr Castle: The Leviathan of Parsonstown

Walk the harbour and the lock where the canal drops into the Shannon

Find the ruins of the canal hotel that housed passengers overnight

Walk the Grand Canal towpath east from the harbour across the bog

Have a pint in one of the two pubs and watch the boats work the lock

Shannon Harbour is where the Grand Canal finally reaches the Shannon after crossing the bogs from Dublin, and for a century it was one of the busiest inland ports in Ireland — passengers and freight transferring between canal boats and river steamers, with a hotel to hold them overnight. The traffic went and the village stayed: a handful of houses, a lock, docking for boats, and two pubs. It is one of the quietest places on the whole waterway, and the junction survives largely as it was build canal junction in the country.

Shannon Harbour: Where the Grand Canal Meets the River

Visit Tuamgraney, Edna O'Brien's birthplace village, born at Drewsboro House in 1930

Visit St Cronan's Church in Tuamgraney, said to be the oldest church in Ireland still in use, and the heritage centre housed in it — early medieval stonework alongside 19th-century parish records

Read a passage from O'Brien's The Country Girls, set in this same rural East Clare landscape

Take the boat from Mountshannon out to Inis Cealtra, Holy Island, where she was buried in 2024

Edna O'Brien was born at Drewsboro House outside Tuamgraney in 1930, and when The Country Girls came out in 1960 the Irish censorship board banned it — one of thousands of titles banned under the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 — and the two novels that followed went the same way. The landscape she was writing about is still here: the East Clare farmland and the northern shore of Lough Derg. In the village, St Cronan's Church houses the East Clare Heritage Centre, and the building itself carries early medieval stonework.

Tuamgraney: Edna O'Brien's East Clare

Find the Cross of the Scriptures and read the carved panels on it

Walk between the nine ruined churches and the two round towers

Look at the collection of over 700 early Christian graveslabs

Stand at the river and work out why the Esker Riada made this the crossroads of the country

Saint Ciarán, a Roscommon man from Rathcroghan, founded Clonmacnoise on the Shannon in 544 — and he chose the spot for a reason. This is where the Slighe Mhór, the great east–west land route, met the river after crossing the central bogs along the Esker Riada. Whoever held it controlled the crossroads of Ireland, which is why kings were buried here and why it was raided again and again. Nine ruined churches, two round towers, a castle and one of the greatest collections of carved crosses and cross-slabs in the country still stand on the riverbank.

Clonmacnoise: Where the Road Met the River

Start at the Copper Coast Geopark visitor centre in the old church at Knockmahon

Walk the cliff path to the engine house at Tankardstown

Find out what the copper mines left on these cliffs

Drive east to Newtown Head and see the Metal Man pointing out to sea

The Copper Coast Geopark runs for about 25 kilometres of the Waterford coast from Kilfarrasy to Stradbally, and was the first geopark designated in Ireland: rocks formed by volcanic activity some 460 million years ago, with dolmens, Iron Age forts and medieval churches on top, and the ruins of 19th-century copper mining on the cliffs. The geopark's visitor centre is in the old Monksland church at Knockmahon, and the engine house at Tankardstown stands on the cliffs. East along the coast, after the transport Sea Horse foundered in Tramore Bay in January 1816, Lloyd's paid for navigation pillars on the headlands, put up in 1823 — three on Newtown Head, one of them topped by the Metal Man pointing out to sea.

The Copper Coast: Engine Houses and the Metal Man

Go through the nine galleries of Titanic Belfast, from Boomtown Belfast to the wreck

Stand at the head of the Titanic and Olympic slipways and see how the building's prows line up with them

Go aboard SS Nomadic in Hamilton Dock, the last White Star Line ship in existence

Find the Thompson Graving Dock, where Titanic was finished before she left Belfast

Find the old Harland & Wolff drawing offices, and look across to Samson and Goliath

Titanic Belfast opened in 2012, a hundred years after the ship's maiden voyage, on Queen's Island, the land Harland & Wolff built Olympic, Titanic and Britannic on. The building stands 38 metres high, the height of Titanic's hull, and its prows point straight down the Titanic and Olympic slipways towards the Lagan; inside, nine galleries run from Boomtown Belfast, the city as it was in 1909–11, through the building, the launch and the sinking. Around it is the rest of the story: the Thompson Graving Dock, where Titanic was finished before she left Belfast; SS Nomadic, launched on 25 April 1911 to carry passengers out to Olympic and Titanic at Cherbourg, and now the last White Star Line ship in existence; Harland & Wolff's headquarters and drawing offices, a hotel since 2017; and Samson and Goliath, the shipyard's Krupp cranes, put up in 1974 and 1969.