Book a guided foraging walk and meet at Buoys & Gulls Café on Bundoran's Main Street for the briefing

Hand-harvest at least three edible seaweed species along the shoreline — dulse, kelp, and carrageen moss — using the cut-not-pull technique that lets the holdfast regrow

Cook a meal using your foraged seaweed the same day

Photograph carrageen moss drying flat on rocks above the tideline, the traditional method used along this coast to prepare it for carrageen pudding

Guided seaweed foraging walks run along the Bundoran shoreline, when the tides and the operator's calendar allow, starting from Buoys & Gulls Café on Main Street. Ireland's Atlantic coast produces dulse, kelp, and carrageen moss — the last of these dried flat on coastal rocks for centuries to make traditional carrageen pudding.

Donegal Seaweed Foraging & Cooking

Join a beach yoga or SUP-yoga session with Bundoran Surf Co on Tullan Strand

Walk the 3km Rougey loop from Bundoran town to the Fairy Bridges sea stacks

At the Wishing Chair beside the Fairy Bridges, sit, tap the stone twice, and make a silent wish — tradition says you must keep it secret

From the Fairy Bridges viewpoint, pick out Slieve League's cliffs across Donegal Bay to the north and Mullaghmore Head to the south

Tullan Strand, a 2km beach on Bundoran's north side, is where Bundoran Surf Co run their surf and SUP lessons. The walk there follows the Rougey loop past the Fairy Bridges sea stacks and the Wishing Chair, a natural stone seat with its own centuries-old ritual.

Tullan Strand: Beach Yoga and the Fairy Bridges

Walk into the open oval court and stand in the ceremonial space

Find the burial chambers leading off the far end of the court

Work out what an open forecourt says about how these tombs were used

Look up at Benbulbin and the Dartry Mountains from the tomb

Creevykeel sits right beside the N15 at Cliffony and is one of the finest court tombs left in Ireland — a full oval forecourt open to the sky, with burial chambers leading off it, built around five and a half thousand years ago. The court is the point: these were tombs designed with an open ceremonial space at the entrance, so whatever was done here was done in front of people. It is free, unfenced and takes ten minutes off the road.

Creevykeel: One of Ireland's Finest Court Tombs

Walk round Mullaghmore Head and watch the Atlantic come in

Look at Classiebawn Castle on the headland and find out who built it

Walk the harbour Palmerston built and Nimmo designed

Find out what happened off this coast in August 1979

Mullaghmore is a village on a headland in north Sligo. The 3rd Viscount Palmerston began Classiebawn Castle on the peninsula and built the stone harbour, to a design by Alexander Nimmo; his agents also oversaw the 'assisted emigration' of tenants during and after the Famine. Classiebawn later became the holiday home of Lord Mountbatten, and it was off this coast in August 1979 that he, his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, Lady Brabourne and Paul Maxwell, a fifteen-year-old from Enniskillen in County Fermanagh who was working on the boat, were killed by an IRA bomb. Today Mullaghmore is a big-wave surfing spot: on 8 March 2012 surfers rode waves up to 15 metres high off the Head.

Mullaghmore: Big Waves and Classiebawn

Walk the demonstration gardens and polytunnels at The Organic Centre

Fish Lough Melvin and find out how a gillaroo differs from an ordinary brown trout

Find the early Christian cross slabs in the churchyard at Rossinver

The Organic Centre at Rossinver was set up in 1995 as a charity to teach organic growing, on a 19-acre site with demonstration gardens and polytunnels, and runs dozens of weekend courses a year, from growing to stone-wall building. The village sits on the southern shore of Lough Melvin, on the Leitrim–Fermanagh border, which is home to two rare kinds of trout, the gillaroo — the red fellow, which lives on snails — and the sonaghen, and to its own endemic char. The church site at Rossinver was founded by St Máedóc, who died around 632, and nearby MacClancy's castle on the lake sheltered survivors from the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Rossinver: The Organic Centre and Lough Melvin

Walk on to the Devil's Chimney after heavy rain and watch the water blow back up over the cliff in a southerly

Read The Stolen Child at the falls Yeats named in it

Walk or drive the length of Glencar Lough under the Dartry Mountains

Yeats wrote The Stolen Child in 1886 and collected it in The Wanderings of Oisin three years later, and the fairies in it call the child away to where the wandering water gushes from the hills above Glen-Car. The waterfall is still there, dropping about fifteen metres into a wooded glen at the end of a short boardwalk from the car park, A kilometre west of it is a second fall, Sruth in Aghaidh an Aird — the Devil's Chimney — at 150 metres the highest in Ireland, and its name is the point: in a southerly wind the water blows backwards, up and over the cliff edge, instead of falling. Glencar Lough runs west along the valley, the Dartry Mountains to the north and Cope's Mountain to the south.

Glencar: The Waterfall in Yeats's Stolen Child

Walk the Benbulbin Forest loop under the northern cliffs

Look at the flat top and work out how a plateau became a table

Find out about the arctic-alpine plants on the cliff ledges — fringed sandwort grows here and nowhere else in Ireland, and the ledges themselves are unstable and out of bounds

Visit Yeats's grave at Drumcliffe in the mountain's shadow

Benbulbin is 526 metres of flat-topped limestone standing over the Sligo plain, and its shape is the record of an ice age: it was a plateau, and the glaciers cut it away on every side until only this table was left standing above the ice as a nunatak. Its flat-topped profile is one of the most recognisable mountain outlines in Ireland. Yeats is buried in its shadow at Drumcliffe, and in the old story it is where Diarmaid was killed by the boar while Gráinne waited.

Benbulbin: The Table Mountain of Yeats Country

Visit the Toons Bridge Dairy farm shop outside Macroom and watch buffalo mozzarella being stretched and shaped if it's being made that day

Taste at least 3 of the more than 15 cheeses Toons Bridge Dairy makes on site

Find the herd of water buffalo grazing near the old creamery building

Eat a pizza made with their own buffalo mozzarella at the on-site pizzeria (weekend service)

Toons Bridge Dairy keeps a herd of water buffalo at Toons Bridge, an old creamery building outside Macroom, making more than 15 cheeses on site including fresh buffalo mozzarella. The farm shop and pizzeria sit between the dairy and the garden, selling the full range alongside imported goods from the on-site Real Olive Co.

Toonsbridge Dairy: Cork's Buffalo Cheese Farm

Meet the birds of prey at the National Bird of Prey Centre on the grounds of Russborough House, Blessington, including Little Owls, Barn Owls, and Harris Hawks

Hold a hand-reared Harris Hawk on your glove during the guided introduction

Take the Hawk Walk through Russborough's historic parkland, watching the hawk fly out from the treetops to your glove

Afterwards, walk the grounds of Russborough House itself — a Palladian mansion built 1741-1755 for Joseph Leeson, with a 210m frontage, one of the longest of any house in Ireland

The National Bird of Prey Centre operates on the grounds of Russborough House, a Palladian mansion near Blessington with one of the longest frontages of any house in Ireland. The centre keeps dozens of birds of prey and runs hawk walks through the historic parkland with hand-reared Harris hawks.