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

Walk the Lighthouse Loop out to the Sheep's Head Lighthouse at the western tip

Walk one full day-stage of the 88km Sheep's Head Way

Pick one of the twenty looped walks in the network and do it

Look across Bantry Bay to Beara and across Dunmanus Bay to Mizen from the ridge

The Sheep's Head is the narrow peninsula between Bantry Bay and Dunmanus Bay, and the Way is 88km of old tracks and roads running out from Bantry to the headland at Muntervary and back along the other side. It is a walking route built out of the paths people actually used, not one cut for tourists, and the network has grown to include twenty looped walks reaching east to Kealkill, Drimoleague and Gougane Barra, where it meets the Beara-Breifne Way. The Lighthouse Loop takes you the whole way to the light at the western tip.

The Sheep's Head Way: Eighty-Eight Kilometres of Old Tracks

Drive or cycle the Healy Pass from Adrigole to the summit

Stand on the Cork–Kerry county line at the top of the pass

Look back down the road the way you came up

Find out what a Famine relief road was, and who it was meant to help

The Healy Pass climbs over the Caha Mountains from Adrigole in Cork to Lauragh in Kerry, crossing the county line at the top. The original track, the Kerry Pass, was cut during the Great Famine as a relief works scheme. It was improved and renamed for Tim Healy, Governor-General of the Irish Free State, who died in 1931 shortly after the work was done. It can be driven or cycled from either side.

The Healy Pass: The Famine Road Over the Cahas

Cross Dursey Sound on Ireland's only cable car

Walk to the Napoleonic signal tower on the highest point of Dursey

Find out what happened to the O'Sullivan Beare garrison on Dursey in 1602

See the Allihies Copper Mine Museum and the Cornish engine houses above the village

At the far end of the Beara peninsula, Dursey Island is joined to the mainland by Ireland's only cable car, over Dursey Sound, a channel with a very strong tidal race. It reopened in 2023 after a year of repairs. In 1602 the O'Sullivan Beares held a castle on the island, and Philip O'Sullivan Beare wrote that its whole garrison was killed by Carew's forces; on the island's highest point stands a signal tower from the Napoleonic Wars. A few kilometres north, Allihies was a copper-mining village: John Puxley's company worked the mines from 1812, and three ruined Cornish engine houses can still be seen from the village, the man-engine house of 1862 on the skyline above it.

Dursey and Allihies: Ireland's Only Cable Car and the Copper Mines

Go round Derrynane House and find the relics of O'Connell's career

Find the library wing O'Connell built in 1825

Walk across Derrynane beach to Abbey Island at low tide and find the ruined abbey

Climb the stairways inside the walls of Staigue Fort, built around 100 BC

Derrynane House was the home of Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator, and it stands in 120 hectares of parkland on the Kerry coast, with relics of his life and career inside. His grandparents built or extended the house in the 1700s; O'Connell himself built the south wing facing the sea and the library wing in 1825, now the oldest parts that survive. Below it you can walk across Derrynane beach to Abbey Island and the ruined Ahamore Abbey, but only at low tide. Nine kilometres away, Staigue Fort was built in the late Iron Age, probably around 100 BC: a ring of dry stone 27 metres across, with walls up to 5.5 metres high and 4 metres thick, and inside an elaborate network of stairways leading to terraces.

Derrynane: O'Connell's House and Staigue Fort

Cross the Mizen Head footbridge, 45 metres above the Atlantic, to reach the signal station

In the signal station museum, find the exhibits on Marconi's wireless work at Crookhaven and Brow Head, 1901 to 1914

Find the 99 steps, the original stretch of the old access route down to the station

From the station, look out for the Fastnet Rock lighthouse, about 17 km out, on a clear day

Mizen Head is the Mizen of "Malin to Mizen", taken traditionally as the southern end of Ireland, though Brow Head just east of it is a few metres further south. A footbridge over a deep chasm — the original reinforced-concrete span went up in 1907, and the present award-winning bridge replaced it in March 2011 — crosses to a signal station that once tracked transatlantic shipping, with a museum telling the story of Marconi's wireless experiments down the road at Crookhaven and Brow Head between 1901 and 1914. Nothing stands between here and the open Atlantic, which is why this station spent a century logging the weather before anywhere else in Ireland felt it.

Mizen Head: Where Atlantic Storms Make Landfall

Go round Bantry House, still lived in by the White family

Walk the gardens the second Earl of Bantry laid out

Cook a meal at your pitch with cheese bought from the maker

Durrus sits ten kilometres from Bantry at the head of Dunmanus Bay, where the Sheep's Head and Mizen peninsulas begin, and gives its name to Durrus cheese, made at Coomkeen in three styles — the classic, the milder Durrus Óg and an oak-smoked version. Up the road, Bantry House has been owned and lived in by the White family, later Earls of Bantry, since the middle of the 18th century; it has been open to the public since the 1940s, and the second Earl and his wife laid out the gardens.

Durrus and Bantry: Farmhouse Cheese and the Whites' House

Soak in a hot seaweed bath at Collins's Seaweed Baths on Ladies Strand, Ballybunion — family-run since 1932, using freshly cut serrated wrack

Walk the Bromore Cliff Top Walk on the working farm 3km outside town, past sea caves, arches, and stacks carved by Atlantic storms

Find the ruined tower house on the headland between Ballybunion's Ladies Strand and Men's Strand beaches

Walk both Blue Flag beaches — Ladies Strand and Men's Strand — either side of the castle headland

Collins's Seaweed Baths on Ballybunion's Ladies Strand have run in the same family since 1932, using freshly cut serrated wrack. A ruined 16th-century tower house sits on the headland between the town's two Blue Flag beaches, with the Bromore Cliff Top Walk 3km further along the coast.

Collins's Seaweed Baths, Ballybunion

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.