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

Climb to McArt's Fort on the summit and find the ditch that defended it

Stand on Napoleon's Nose and look down over the whole city and Belfast Lough

Find the caves cut into the basalt face that give the hill its name

Walk up through the grounds of Belfast Castle on the lower slopes

Cave Hill rises 368 metres straight behind Belfast, basalt cliffs and caves along its face, and the cliff at the end of it is called Napoleon's Nose because from the city it looks like a profile lying on its back. On the highest point are the remains of McArt's Fort, an ancient promontory fort defended by the cliff on one side and a ditch on the other. The whole of Belfast, the lough and the Down coast open up beneath you.

Cave Hill: Napoleon's Nose Over Belfast

Walk the bawn walls and the fortified house inside them

Find out what a bawn was for and why the London companies built so many

Ask what of the Heaney material is on show at the bawn, and what has moved to HomePlace up the road

Walk from the bawn into the townland Heaney wrote about

A bawn is a fortified enclosure, and the Plantation of Ulster covered the county in them — walled yards with a house inside, built by London livery companies to hold the land they had been granted. Bellaghy's was burned in the 1641 rebellion and rebuilt in 1643. Construction began about 1614 under John Rowley, it became a museum in 1996, and because Seamus Heaney grew up a few fields away the bawn has shown material on him as well as on the Plantation — one building carrying both the settlement and the poetry that came out of the ground it settled.

Bellaghy Bawn: A Plantation Fort That Heaney Wrote In

Go through the Seamus Heaney HomePlace centre in Bellaghy

Walk the Heaney trail through the townland landscape of the poems

Find Mossbawn, the farm where Heaney grew up

See Anahorish, the school he was educated at and named a poem after

Visit St Mary's Church in Bellaghy, where Heaney is buried

Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for poems that mostly come out of a few square miles of County Derry farmland — the farm at Mossbawn, the school at Anahorish, the bog, the water pump, his father digging. HomePlace in Bellaghy is built around that material, with his desk, his notebooks and his voice reading the poems. Heaney is buried at St Mary's in Bellaghy, a few minutes' walk from it, under a stone carrying a line of his own.

Heaney Country: Bellaghy, Mossbawn and Anahorish

Find the high cross on its hillock at the western shore of Lough Neagh

Read the carved scriptural panels on all four faces of the cross

Look out over Lough Neagh, the largest lake in Ireland and Britain, from beside the cross

Find out about the magic cow the place is named for

Ard Bó means high cow, and the name comes from a legend that the monastery here was built with mortar mixed from the milk of a magic cow that came up out of Lough Neagh. St Colman of Ardboe founded it in the 6th century, and the only thing left of it is the high cross — 9th or 10th century, standing on a small hillock right at the western shore of the lough, and one of the finest examples of the Irish high cross anywhere in Ulster.

Ardboe: The High Cross Built From a Magic Cow's Milk

Walk the tunnel under the Crumlin Road between the gaol and the courthouse

Go into the cells on C Wing and shut yourself in one

See the condemned man's cell and the execution chamber

Look across at the derelict courthouse from the gaol side

Charles Lanyon designed the Crumlin Road Gaol and it was built between 1843 and 1845 at a cost of £60,000. It held prisoners until 1996 and is the only Victorian-era prison left standing in Northern Ireland. The courthouse sits directly opposite, derelict since it closed, and a tunnel runs under the main road between the two so that prisoners could be moved from cell to dock without ever going outside. You walk through it on the tour.

Crumlin Road Gaol: The Tunnel Under the Road

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.

Titanic Belfast: The Slipways Where She Was Built

Walk the five-kilometre spit of Inch Strand

Have a drink in the South Pole Inn, the pub Tom Crean ran after 1920

Find out what Crean's 35-mile walk across the Ross Ice Shelf was for

Inch Strand is a sand spit five kilometres long reaching into Dingle Bay, part of the Castlemaine Harbour conservation area. Five kilometres west is Annascaul, where Tom Crean was born in 1877. He left the farm at sixteen for the Navy, went south with Scott's Discovery and Terra Nova expeditions and with Shackleton's Endurance, and won the Albert Medal for a solo walk of 35 miles across the Ross Ice Shelf to save a dying officer. When he retired in 1920 he came home and ran the South Pole Inn with his wife and daughters until he died in 1938.

Inch Strand and Annascaul: Tom Crean's Country

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.