Cross Dursey Sound on Ireland's only cable car

Walk to the Napoleonic signal tower on the highest point of Dursey

Find out what happened to the O'Sullivan Beare garrison on Dursey in 1602

See the Allihies Copper Mine Museum and the Cornish engine houses above the village

At the far end of the Beara peninsula, Dursey Island is joined to the mainland by Ireland's only cable car, over Dursey Sound, a channel with a very strong tidal race. It reopened in 2023 after a year of repairs. In 1602 the O'Sullivan Beares held a castle on the island, and Philip O'Sullivan Beare wrote that its whole garrison was killed by Carew's forces; on the island's highest point stands a signal tower from the Napoleonic Wars. A few kilometres north, Allihies was a copper-mining village: John Puxley's company worked the mines from 1812, and three ruined Cornish engine houses can still be seen from the village, the man-engine house of 1862 on the skyline above it.

Dursey and Allihies: Ireland's Only Cable Car and the Copper Mines

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

Explore Lonehort Battery, the gun battery dug into the eastern end of Bere Island around 1900

Walk the Heritage Trail past Bere Island's four Martello towers and the garrison barracks, built after the failed French invasion attempt at Bantry Bay in 1796

Visit the Signal Tower at Derrycreeveen, part of the chain of coastal watch towers built in the early 1800s

Take the ferry from Castletownbere, the mainland fishing port serving Bere Island

In December 1796 a French invasion fleet of between 12,000 and 25,000 troops under General Lazare Hoche made for Bantry Bay, sent at the urging of Wolfe Tone, who had gone to Paris to argue that Ireland was the least defensible part of the British Isles. Most of the fleet got there. None of it landed — the weather was the worst recorded since 1708 and the commanders had been blown miles off course. Britain spent the next decade making sure of the coast, and Bere Island is what that left behind: four Martello towers and the barracks built for the garrison, a signal tower at Derrycreeveen, and at Lonehort a battery built around 1900 over an earlier Martello of 1805.

Bere Island's Napoleonic Defences

Walk the Lighthouse Loop out to the Sheep's Head Lighthouse at the western tip

Walk one full day-stage of the 88km Sheep's Head Way

Pick one of the twenty looped walks in the network and do it

Look across Bantry Bay to Beara and across Dunmanus Bay to Mizen from the ridge

The Sheep's Head is the narrow peninsula between Bantry Bay and Dunmanus Bay, and the Way is 88km of old tracks and roads running out from Bantry to the headland at Muntervary and back along the other side. It is a walking route built out of the paths people actually used, not one cut for tourists, and the network has grown to include twenty looped walks reaching east to Kealkill, Drimoleague and Gougane Barra, where it meets the Beara-Breifne Way. The Lighthouse Loop takes you the whole way to the light at the western tip.

The Sheep's Head Way: Eighty-Eight Kilometres of Old Tracks

Walk the ruins of Ballinskelligs Priory by the shore

Walk out to Ballinskelligs Castle on its promontory, built by the MacCarthy Mór in the 16th century

Find out where the 1875 cable from Nova Scotia came ashore

Ballinskelligs — Baile an Sceilg, the town of the craggy rock — takes its name from the Skelligs off its coast, and it is in the Kerry Gaeltacht. By the shore stand the ruins of Ballinskelligs Priory, a house of Augustinian canons, and on a narrow, eroding promontory the MacCarthy Mór built Ballinskelligs Castle in the 16th century to guard the bay from pirates. In 1875 a transatlantic telegraph cable was brought ashore here from Tor Bay in Nova Scotia, 2,565 nautical miles away. Up the hill, the Cill Rialaig project keeps an artists' retreat in an old village.

Ballinskelligs: The Priory, the Castle and the Cable to America

Get out on a clear moonless night away from the village lights and let your eyes adapt for twenty minutes

Trace the Milky Way from horizon to horizon

Find one of the reserve's designated viewing points on the Skellig Ring

Learn why Gold Tier is the highest dark-sky grade there is, and what it takes to keep it

The Iveragh Peninsula between Kells and Caherdaniel holds Ireland's first International Dark Sky Reserve, and on 27 January 2014 the International Dark-Sky Association gave it Gold Tier — the first Gold Tier Reserve in the northern hemisphere and one of only four in the world. There is no town light bleeding in from anywhere, the Atlantic is on three sides, and on a clear moonless night the Milky Way is not a faint smudge but a structure you can trace from one horizon to the other.

The Kerry Dark Sky Reserve: Gold Tier on the Iveragh

Cross the Mizen Head footbridge, 45 metres above the Atlantic, to reach the signal station

In the signal station museum, find the exhibits on Marconi's wireless work at Crookhaven and Brow Head, 1901 to 1914

Find the 99 steps, the original stretch of the old access route down to the station

From the station, look out for the Fastnet Rock lighthouse, about 17 km out, on a clear day

Mizen Head is the Mizen of "Malin to Mizen", taken traditionally as the southern end of Ireland, though Brow Head just east of it is a few metres further south. A footbridge over a deep chasm — the original reinforced-concrete span went up in 1907, and the present award-winning bridge replaced it in March 2011 — crosses to a signal station that once tracked transatlantic shipping, with a museum telling the story of Marconi's wireless experiments down the road at Crookhaven and Brow Head between 1901 and 1914. Nothing stands between here and the open Atlantic, which is why this station spent a century logging the weather before anywhere else in Ireland felt it.

Mizen Head: Where Atlantic Storms Make Landfall

Walk in from the main entrance at the Mullyvea gate, opposite Kiltooris Lough

Scan the lough and the machair for Greenland white-fronted geese and whooper swans in winter

Find choughs feeding on the short grass of the machair

Look for marsh fritillaries and the reserve's orchids, including the rare Irish orchid, in the dune grassland and slacks

Walk out to the coastal heath on the headland beyond the dunes

Sheskinmore Nature Reserve lies between Kiltooris and Ballinreavy Strand, north-west of Ardara: a fixed dune system of machair grassland and dune slacks round Sheskinmore Lough, with marsh, fen and reedbed around the lough and coastal heath out on the headland beyond the dunes. In winter it takes Greenland white-fronted geese, whooper swans, lapwing and golden plover, and chough are here all year. Marsh fritillary and dingy skipper both breed on the reserve, and the orchids include marsh helleborine, bee orchid, frog orchid and the rare Irish orchid. Cattle graze it through the winter.

Sheskinmore: Geese, Choughs and Orchids Behind the Dunes

Tour Athlone Castle, whose polygonal tower of 1210 is still the keep

Take a boat out onto Lough Ree from Athlone harbour at the lake's southern end

Walk Athlone's Left Bank, the old quarter between the castle and the river

Look up the lake to where Longford, Westmeath and Roscommon share its shores

Athlone grew up where the Shannon could be crossed, and that is why there is a castle here. The stone castle was built in 1210 for King John by his justiciar, John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, on a motte by the river, to hold the crossing and give the Normans a bridgehead into Connacht; it stands on or near the site of a wooden castle raised in 1129 by Tairrdelbach Ua Conchobair, and its polygonal tower of 1210, greatly altered, is still the keep. The town sits at the southern end of Lough Ree, the second-largest lake on the Shannon after Lough Derg, which forms the border between Longford and Westmeath on the east and Roscommon on the west. The old quarter, the Left Bank, is squeezed between the castle and the river.