Start at the national park visitor centre in Ballycroy

Walk out onto the blanket bog on the park's trails

Come back on a clear moonless night and look for the Milky Way

Find out what it takes to earn Gold Tier as a dark sky park

Wild Nephin National Park takes in much of the Nephin Beg mountains and some 150 square kilometres of Atlantic blanket bog, one of the largest expanses of peatland in Europe; it was set up as Ballycroy National Park in 1998 and enlarged and renamed in 2018, and it includes the most remote point of land on the Irish mainland. It is also the Mayo Dark Sky Park, Ireland's first International Dark Sky Park, given Gold Tier in May 2016 — the highest grade there is. The visitor centre, opened in 2009, looks out over the Atlantic from Ballycroy village.

Wild Nephin: Ireland's First Dark Sky Park

Achill Island

A week-long loop from Ballina: salmon on the Moy and the 1798 French landing, Achill's deserted village and Ireland's first dark sky park, then the Greenway and Croagh Patrick from Westport.

Into The West - Magical Mayo

Walk the length of the village, about a kilometre and a half, through its three sections

Look at how the houses are built — better than nine in ten are single-roomed byre houses, the cattle wintered at one end and the family at the other

At the eastern end, find the sweathouse — a low beehive of stone, the Irish equivalent of a sauna, used against rheumatism

At the western end, find the Slievemore megalithic tomb, a Neolithic tomb of roughly five thousand years ago that has never been excavated

Find out why the families who left in the 1850s came back up here every summer until the 1940s

On the southern foothills of Slievemore on Achill Island, a line of ruined stone houses runs about a kilometre and a half east to west in three sections — Tuar, Tuar Riabhach and Faiche — with 137 houses recorded by the Ordnance Survey. The archaeology puts the settlement no earlier than about 1750, and it was lived in the year round under the rundale system, the summer booley pastures being elsewhere on the island at Annagh, Dirk, Keem Bay and Bunnowna. It was abandoned through the 1850s — hurried by the Famine but not caused by it alone, with poor harvests, thinning soil and rising rents behind it — and most of the families moved down to Dooagh on the coast. Then they kept coming back: their descendants drove cattle up here every summer and lived in the old houses until the 1940s, the last place in Ireland or Britain where booleying survived.

Slievemore Deserted Village: The Last Booley Village

Walk out to Moyteoge Head above Keem Bay and look down on the beach and the cliffs

Walk down to Keem Bay's horseshoe beach and find Moyteoge Head, where the shark fishery's lookouts are said to have watched for fins

Hike Croaghaun and look down its sheer northern cliffs — at 688m, the highest sea cliffs in Ireland

Look across from the Keem road to Achill Head, the westernmost point of the island

Achill Island is Ireland's largest island, joined to the mainland by a road bridge at Achill Sound. Its west end holds Keem Bay's Blue Flag beach — once the base for one of the world's best-recorded basking shark fisheries — and Croaghaun, whose 688m northern cliffs are the highest sea cliffs in Ireland and third-highest in Europe.

Achill: Keem Bay and the Deserted Village

Find the O'Malley tomb in Clare Island Abbey, thought to be Grace O'Malley's burial place, under its rare medieval roof paintings

Climb Knockmore, the island's highest point at 462 metres, for views across Clew Bay's scattered islands

Walk out to the old Clare Island Lighthouse on the north cliffs, dark since 1965 and now a private guesthouse

Find the O'Malley coat of arms carved in the abbey, with the family motto 'Terra Marique Potens' — powerful on land and sea

Grace O'Malley ran Clew Bay as a sea power in the 16th century and is thought to be buried on Clare Island, in the Cistercian abbey founded in the 12th or 13th century, which keeps rare medieval roof paintings. The O'Malley arms are carved in the same building with the family motto, Terra Marique Potens — powerful on land and sea, which in her case was accurate. Behind the abbey, Knockmore rises to 462 metres, high enough to show you the whole scatter of islands in the bay she controlled.

Grace O'Malley's Clare Island

Climb Croagh Patrick mountain (764m) to the summit chapel

Find the site where Saint Patrick is said to have fasted for 40 days in the 5th century, giving the mountain its pilgrim tradition

Time your visit for Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July, when anything from five to thirty thousand pilgrims climb the mountain, some barefoot

See the National Famine Memorial at Murrisk, John Behan's coffin ship of 1997, and the ruined abbey beside it

Croagh Patrick is a quartzite cone rising 764m straight out of Clew Bay, and the tradition holds that Patrick fasted on the summit for forty days in the 5th century. People have been walking up it ever since — on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July, anything from five to thirty thousand climb it in a single day, and some of them still do it barefoot. The scree on the final cone is the hard part, loose quartzite that moves under you. The round trip is about 7km and the chapel at the top has been there since 1905. Most pilgrims now start from Murrisk, beside the ruined Augustinian abbey the O'Malleys founded in 1457, and across the road stands the National Famine Memorial, John Behan's bronze coffin ship, unveiled by President Mary Robinson in July 1997.

Croagh Patrick: The Reek

Cycle the Great Western Greenway from Westport toward Newport, on a trail 42 km long end to end

Ride into the Westport Estate demesne at the greenway's Westport end — the house is closed, but the grounds are open

Find out why the railway to Achill closed in 1937 and lay unused for more than seventy years

The Achill extension of the Midland Great Western Railway was built in the 1890s and closed in 1937, and the trackbed lay there for more than seventy years until it reopened as the Great Western Greenway: 42 kilometres of off-road trail from Westport through Newport and Mulranny to Achill, its first section opened in 2010 and the full route on 29 July 2011. You ride with Clew Bay on one side and Croagh Patrick across the water. At the Westport end stands Westport House, for three centuries the seat of the Brownes, Marquesses of Sligo, and designed by Richard Cassels; the family sold it in 2017 and the house itself is closed, though the estate around it stays open.

The Great Western Greenway: Westport to Achill

Go through the Céide Fields visitor centre and find out how the walls were found

Walk the bog and look at the excavated walls where they come out of the peat

Find out what woodland the farmers cleared, and what the bog then did to their fields

Find out why the date of the fields is argued over

In the 1930s a schoolteacher, Patrick Caulfield, cutting turf on the north Mayo coast, noticed lines of stones coming out of the peat. Forty years later his son Seamus, by then an archaeologist, began to work out what they were: a landscape of stone-walled fields, houses and megalithic tombs buried under the blanket bog, with more than 100 kilometres of walls still hidden beneath the peat. It has traditionally been dated to the Neolithic, the fourth millennium BC, when farmers cleared pine and birch woodland for pasture; some recent research argues it is later, Bronze Age. A visitor centre on the site explains the finds.

Céide Fields: The Farms Under the Bog

Kayak on Lough Neagh, the largest lake in Ireland and Britain at 383 km²

Cycle a stretch of the Loughshore Trail, the signed cycling route that circles the entire lake

Walk Antrim Castle Gardens and find the T-shaped 17th-century canals, unique in Ulster

Find the Norman motte in the castle grounds, four centuries older than the canals

Lough Neagh is the largest lake in Ireland and in Britain, 383 square kilometres of it, and big enough that from the middle you lose sight of the shore. A signed cycling route, the Loughshore Trail, goes the whole way round it. On the Antrim shore, Antrim Castle Gardens keep a 17th-century formal garden, unique in Ulster, with a long canal and a second at right angles to it; the castle that stood beside them was built in 1613 by Sir Hugh Clotworthy and enlarged in 1662 by his son John, and a Norman motte stands in the same grounds, four hundred years older than the canals.

Lough Neagh: The Loughshore Trail

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.