Take part in an Irish-language workshop on Arranmore, the largest inhabited island in Donegal and a stronghold of Ulster Irish

Visit Arranmore Lighthouse at the island's north-west tip, first established in 1798

Go sea angling from the island's harbour at Leabgarrow

Take the ferry from Burtonport, and walk or cycle the island road round the cliffs on the western side

Arranmore is the largest inhabited island in Donegal and one of the strongholds of Ulster Irish — a dialect distinct enough from the Irish of Connacht and Munster that learners notice it immediately. The island runs Irish-language workshops, which is the honest way to spend a few days here rather than just looking at it. The lighthouse at the north-west tip was first established in 1798, and the ferry runs from Burtonport on the mainland.

Arranmore: Donegal's Gaeltacht Island

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

Climb Errigal from the Dunlewey side, up the quartzite scree

Cross One Man's Pass, the narrow ridge between the two summit tops

Look out over the Poisoned Glen and Dunlewey Lough from the top

Pick out the rest of the Seven Sisters running north from Errigal

Errigal rises 751m over Gweedore, the highest peak in Donegal and the highest of the Derryveagh Mountains — the southernmost and steepest of the chain locals call the Seven Sisters. It is a cone of white quartzite scree that catches the light and looks, from the road at Dunlewey, far bigger than its height suggests. The final section is a narrow ridge between the two summit tops, and the drop on either side concentrates the mind.

Errigal: The Quartzite Cone Over Dunlewey

Drive the hairpins of the Glengesh Pass south out of Ardara

Stop at the top of the pass and look back down the glen

Find a working handweaver in Ardara and watch Donegal tweed being made

Walk Maghera Strand and look into the sea caves under Slievetooey at low tide

Stop at the Assaranca waterfall on the road out to Maghera

Ardara is the weaving town of south-west Donegal, where Donegal tweed is still made by hand, and the road south out of it climbs the Glengesh Pass in a set of hairpins onto empty moorland before dropping away towards Glencolmcille. It is one of the great short drives in Ireland and it takes about ten minutes, which is the joke of it. West of the town, below Slievetooey, Maghera Strand hides more than twenty sea caves that you can only reach when the tide is out, and on the road out to it is the Assaranca waterfall.

Ardara and the Glengesh Pass

Take the ferry from Magheroarty and stay a night rather than day-tripping

See the work of the Tory school of naive painters on the island

Find the round tower, built in the 6th or 7th century

Walk out to the eastern spur and the pinnacles known as Balor's soldiers

Tory sits out in the Atlantic off the Donegal coast and has a king, chosen by the islanders' consensus rather than by any vote — the last of them, Patsy Dan Rodgers, was a painter who held the post from the 1990s until his death in 2018 and met every boat that landed. The island's school of naive painting grew up after the English artist Derek Hill began working here, and islanders paint the place themselves rather than leaving it to visitors. A round tower from the 6th or 7th century still stands, and out on the eastern spur are the rock pinnacles called Balor's soldiers, after the Fomorian king of the evil eye who is supposed to have lived here.

Tory Island: The King, the Painters and Balor's Rock

Go through the Folk Village cottages, one for each of three centuries

Walk the Turas, or as many of its fifteen stations as you can

Find the holy well at Beefan on the Turas route

Gleann Cholm Cille, on the Atlantic coast of south-west Donegal, is named after St Colm Cille — Columba — one of Ireland's three patron saints, and it is in the Gaeltacht. On 9 June, his feast day, the local people walk the Turas: fifteen stations of cross-slabs, stone crosses, a holy well, a church site and megalithic tombs, beginning at a court cairn built about 3000 BC, each station circled three times sunwise with prayers. The holy well is in the townland of Beefan. Father James McDyer came to the glen in December 1951, when seventy years of emigration had taken about 60 per cent of the parish's people; he set up local industries to stop the decline, and in 1967 opened the Folk Village: thatched cottages furnished as they would have been in the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s, with a schoolhouse, a shebeen and a fisherman's cottage.

Glencolmcille: The Folk Village and Colm Cille's Turas

Walk the 3.5 km Lakeside Walk from the Visitor Centre along Lough Beagh to Glenveagh Castle — the same ground the Derryveagh tenants were cleared from in April 1861

On the castle tour — self-guided most days, with guided tours limited and booked ahead — find the weighing chair in the foyer, where McIlhenny weighed every guest coming and going

Walk the Belgian Walk, a flagged terrace built in 1915 by Belgian civilian refugees displaced by the First World War, and photograph the terracotta azalea pots lining its length

In the walled garden, locate the Gothic Orangery designed by French decorator Philippe Jullian — photograph it against the exposed Donegal hillside visible beyond the garden walls

Scan the Derryveagh ridges for the golden eagles reintroduced to the park in 2000, and look for red deer on the open ground

John George Adair evicted 44 families, some 244 people, from this Donegal valley in April 1861 — clearing them under police escort after a quarrel over trespassing sheep and the killing of his Scottish steward — then built Glenveagh Castle on the emptied land between 1867 and 1873. Henry McIlhenny, a Philadelphia art collector who had rented the place each summer from 1933, bought the estate in 1938, sold the land to the state in 1975 and gave it the castle and gardens in 1979, using it himself until 1983. Golden eagles, extinct here for a century, were reintroduced into the park in 2000, and the valley holds the largest herd of red deer in Ireland.

Glenveagh: The Castle Built on Cleared Ground

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

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.