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

Dingle

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

Be in Killorglin for Puck Fair, 10 to 12 August

Watch the Queen of Puck crown the wild goat King Puck

See the horse fair and the cattle fair that run alongside it

Stay for the dethroning, when King Puck is taken back to the mountains and let go

Every year from 10 to 12 August, a party goes up into MacGillycuddy's Reeks and catches a wild goat. The goat is brought down to Killorglin, a young schoolgirl chosen as the Queen of Puck crowns him King Puck, and he is crowned in the square and raised on his stand for a spell on each day of the fair — animal-welfare rules ended the old three-day vigil. It is one of the oldest fairs in Ireland and nobody can say with certainty how it started. Then he is taken back to the mountain and released.

Puck Fair: The Goat They Crown King

Complete the 85km peninsula circuit from Dingle via Slea Head Drive

Climb the Conor Pass on the R560 to 456m, one of the highest passes in Ireland on a tarred road

Handle the exposed Atlantic wind on the Slea Head coastal sections

Take the Conor Pass descent carefully — single track in places, with a rock wall on one side and a drop on the other

Finish back in Dingle town having taken in both the pass and the head in one ride

Eighty-five kilometres around the Dingle Peninsula taking in both of its hard parts. Slea Head Drive runs the exposed western edge where the Atlantic wind comes in unbroken and the beehive huts sit above the road. The Conor Pass on the R560 tops out at 456m, one of the highest passes in Ireland served by a tarred road, linking Dingle with Brandon Bay and Castlegregory over a single-track shelf cut into the mountain with a rock wall one side and a drop the other. The descent needs more care than the climb.

Slea Head and the Conor Pass: The Dingle Circuit

Book and complete a traditional Irish cooking class covering brown soda bread at Dingle Cookery School

Mix and shape your own loaf by hand rather than watching a demonstration

Ask what makes Irish soda bread rely on bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk rather than yeast

Take your baked loaf away to eat at your own pitch that evening

Irish soda bread does not use yeast. It rises on bicarbonate of soda reacting with the acid in buttermilk, which is why it can be mixed and in the oven inside ten minutes and why every farmhouse could make it daily without keeping a starter alive. Dingle Cookery School teaches the traditional brown loaf alongside naturally leavened sourdough — the slow opposite of the same craft. You mix and shape your own by hand, and you take the loaf away with you.

Dingle Cookery School: Soda Bread and Sourdough

Walk the ship canal towpath from Tralee to Blennerville

See Blennerville Windmill, built in 1800 and restored to working order

Climb onto the mountain track along the northern flank of the Slieve Mish

Look up to Caherconree and find out who Cú Roí was

Come down to the sea at Camp at the end of the stage

The Dingle Way is a 162-kilometre circuit of the peninsula that starts and ends in Tralee, and this is its first stage. It leaves town along the towpath of the Tralee Ship Canal to Blennerville, where the restored windmill of 1800, built for Sir Rowland Blennerhassett, stands over the old port that emigrant ships such as the Jeanie Johnston sailed from. Then it climbs onto a mountain track along the northern flank of the Slieve Mish towards Camp. Above the route is Caherconree, 835 metres, with the promontory fort of Cú Roí, the legendary king of Munster, on one of its spurs.

The Dingle Way: Tralee to the Slieve Mish

Climb the Faha Route, the Pilgrim's Path, up Brandon's eastern side

Count the paternoster lakes stepping down the corrie below Faha Ridge

Reach the summit at 952m, the end of the Cosán na Naomh pilgrim route

Look along the Brandon Group ridge to Brandon Peak at 840m

Start or finish in Cloghane, on the north coast of the peninsula under Brandon's eastern slopes

Mount Brandon is 952m, the highest mountain in Ireland outside MacGillycuddy's Reeks and second only to Carrauntoohil in prominence. It is named for Saint Brendan and is the end of the Christian pilgrimage route Cosán na Naomh, the Path of the Saints. The Faha Route up the eastern side — the Pilgrim's Path — takes four to five hours and passes through a deep corrie of rocky plateaus, each holding a small paternoster lake, more than ten of them growing in size as they step down the mountain.

Mount Brandon: The Pilgrim's Path and the Paternoster Lakes

Walk into the Hag's Glen and climb the Devil's Ladder to the col

Stand at the summit cross of Carrauntoohil, 1,038.6m, the highest point in Ireland

Look along the Beenkeragh Ridge north to Beenkeragh and the Caher Ridge west to Caher — the only other Irish peaks over 1,000m

Come down by the zig-zags rather than the Ladder, which is badly eroded and dangerous with people above you

Carrauntoohil is the highest mountain in Ireland at 1,038.6m, standing at the centre of MacGillycuddy's Reeks on the Iveragh Peninsula. Most people go up the Devil's Ladder, a steep eroded gully out of the Hag's Glen — Com Caillí, the hollow of the Cailleach — which is the shortest way and not the easiest. Two arêtes run off the summit to the only other Irish peaks over a thousand metres: the Beenkeragh Ridge north to Beenkeragh at 1,008m, and the Caher Ridge west to Caher at 1,000m. A steel cross stands on the top.

Carrauntoohil: The Roof of Ireland

Walk round Altamont's lake, dug as Famine relief work in the 1840s

Take the family-led tour of Huntington Castle

Walk the yew walk at Huntington, older than the castle

Altamont, between Tullow and Ballon, has 40 acres of gardens, the Ice Age Glen and walks down to the Slaney. The house goes back to the 1720s; in the 1840s the Dawson Borrer family had the lake dug as relief work during the Famine, and in the 1920s Fielding Lecky Watson grew the azaleas and rhododendrons round it from seed. Corona North left it to the state before she died in 1999, and it is free to enter. Down the road at Clonegal, Huntington Castle was built in 1625 by Sir Laurence Esmonde to guard the Wexford road, and the same family line has lived there ever since; its yew walk is older than the house, and in the 1970s its basement became a temple to Isis.

Altamont and Huntington: Two Carlow Gardens

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.