Mountain bike the Slieve Bloom trails from the Baunreagh or Kinnitty trailhead

Hike to the Stony Man, an old stone cairn on the Ridge of Capard built from quarrying spoil

Start from the Glenbarrow trailhead at the foot of the ridge

Walk the rerouted loop under the Ridge of Capard, following the yellow hiker arrows

The Slieve Blooms rise out of the middle of Ireland with nothing else around them, which is why the mountain biking works: the Slieve Bloom trails run from the Baunreagh and Kinnitty trailheads, graded blue to black, and a boardwalk on the Ridge of Capard opens out over both Laois and Offaly at once. The Stony Man is an old cairn up on the ridge, built out of quarrying spoil. Glenbarrow, at the foot of the ridge, is one of the trailheads for the 70-kilometre Slieve Bloom Way, with Glenbarrow Falls close by.

The Ridge of Capard and Glenbarrow

Ride the Baunreagh trail network in the Slieve Bloom Mountains, Laois's red and black grade mountain bike routes

Tackle the technical single-track sections graded red or black at Baunreagh

Compare Baunreagh's technical Laois trails with the Kinnitty routes across the Offaly border, part of the same 80km+ network

Start and finish at the Baunreagh car park, reached via forest road off the R440 Kinnitty–Mountrath road

The Slieve Blooms carry more than 80km of purpose-built mountain bike trail, and the Laois end of it at Baunreagh is the technical end — red and black graded singletrack cut into forestry on the mountain's flank. The Kinnitty trails across the Offaly border are part of the same network and ride quite differently, so a day doing both tells you which sort of rider you are. The trailhead car park is off a forest road from the R440 between Kinnitty and Mountrath.

Baunreagh: Slieve Bloom Singletrack

Climb Arderin to 527m, the highest point of the Slieve Blooms

Stand on the Laois–Offaly county line running across the summit

Try on a clear day to make out how far you can see in each direction

Walk in from the Glenbarrow trailhead at the far end of the range, and take in Glenbarrow Falls if you have the day for it

Arderin is Ard Éireann — the height of Ireland — and at 527 metres it is the highest point of the Slieve Bloom Mountains, standing on the Laois–Offaly border at the south-western end of the range. The name is the interesting part: this is nowhere near the highest mountain in the country, but it stands alone in the middle of a flat island, so from the top you can see an extraordinary distance in every direction, and the traditional claim is that on a clear day you can pick out high ground on both coasts from the top.

Arderin: The Height of Ireland

See Francis Johnston's Gothic Revival front from the demesne — public tours are suspended at present

Find out what a vaulted gallery was for in a house that was never meant to be defended

Walk the ancient oak woodland in the demesne around the castle

Ask about the ghost stories — the castle has never tried to play them down

Charles William Bury commissioned Charleville in 1798 and Francis Johnston built it between 1800 and 1812, on the edge of Tullamore beside the River Clodiagh. It is Gothic Revival taken entirely seriously — turrets, battlements and a great vaulted gallery, all of it built as a house rather than a fortification, at a moment when the country around it had just come through rebellion. The demesne oaks are old enough to have been standing well before the castle was thought of.

Charleville Castle: Francis Johnston's Gothic Fantasy

Tour the house and stand under the rotunda's dome, finished about 1860 by William Caldbeck

Walk the wooded avenue through the parkland to the house

Compare Emo with Gandon's Custom House and King's Inns in Dublin

James Gandon designed the Custom House and the King's Inns and gave Dublin much of its face — and in 1790 he designed Emo Court for John Dawson, the first Earl of Portarlington. It is one of the few country houses he ever did, and it took seventy years and several architects to finish: the domed rotunda you stand under was completed about 1860 by the Dublin architect William Caldbeck, long after Gandon's death in 1823. The Portarlingtons shut the house up and left during the revolutionary years, and in 1920 the estate — nearly twenty square miles of it — was sold to the Land Commission; the house and gardens came into State ownership in the 1990s and the OPW runs them now.

Emo Court: A Country House by the Custom House Architect

Climb the outcrop through the successive gatehouses to the keep on top

Stand where Dunamase passed to Strongbow in 1170 as part of Aoife's dowry

Look west across the plain to the Slieve Bloom Mountains from the summit

Trace the lines of the outer bailey walls in the grass below the keep

Dunamase is a limestone outcrop rising 46 metres straight off the Laois plain with a ruined castle on top and a view across to the Slieve Blooms. In 1170 Diarmait Mac Murchada handed it over, along with his daughter Aoife, to the Norman Strongbow as the price of military help — which is how the most important Hiberno-Norman fortification in Laois came to exist, and how the Norman invasion of Ireland got started. The O'Mores held it for centuries afterwards. It is free, unfenced and usually empty.

The Rock of Dunamase: Aoife's Dowry

Walk the sculpture park and find the first pieces, made on the bog in 2002

Cycle or walk the trails across the cutaway bog

Find out what the Mesolithic camp found at Boora says about the first people here

Walk down to the angling lakes and the nature reserve

Boora Bog was cut away for peat by Bord na Móna, and the lake that gave it its name was drained. What was left has been given back: a nature reserve kept by the Irish Wildlife Trust, angling lakes, and Sculpture in the Parklands, a 50-acre land and environmental sculpture park that began in 2002, when seven Irish and international artists spent three weeks making the first pieces out on the bog. Excavations here also found a temporary camp from the Mesolithic.

Lough Boora: Sculpture on a Cutaway Bog

Read a chapter of Castle Rackrent in the town where it was written

Find out how the rector's son from Edgeworthstown became Louis XVI's confessor

Find out what Maria Edgeworth's letters to Scott and Ricardo were about

Edgeworthstown was named in the 19th century after the Anglo-Irish Edgeworths, whose estate Richard Lovell Edgeworth built here. His daughter Maria came to it as a child in 1773 and lived and wrote here until she died in 1849, helping run the estate; her first novel, Castle Rackrent, gave the voice to an Irish Catholic servant to tell the decline of a landed family of her own class. She corresponded with Walter Scott and David Ricardo. The family also produced the economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth and, from the rector's house, Henry Essex Edgeworth, who became the confessor of Louis XVI.

Edgeworthstown: Maria Edgeworth's Town

Walk the Castle Trail to the ruins of Rossmore Castle

Walk the yew avenue from the walled garden

Find the wedge tomb and the court tomb in the park

Count the drumlins you can see from the high ground

Monaghan is drumlin country, a county of small rounded glacial hills, and Rossmore Forest Park, 320 hectares of woodland just south of Monaghan town, runs over and between them. It was the demesne of the Barons Rossmore. Their castle, built in the Gothic style in 1827 by William Vitruvius Morrison, kept growing: a rivalry with the Shirleys of Lough Fea over who had the largest room in the county saw the drawing room extended five times, and the house ended up with three towers and more than 117 windows in at least 53 sizes and shapes. The family left in the 1940s and it was demolished in the 1970s. An avenue of yews runs about half a kilometre from the walled garden, and the park also holds a wedge tomb, a court tomb and Californian redwoods.