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

The Dingle Peninsula

Two weeks down the Atlantic edge: seven campsites, each with the challenges around it, from Croagh Patrick to the 618 steps of Skellig Michael.

The Wild Atlantic Way: Westport to the Skelligs

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

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

Visit the Blasket Islands Centre at Dún Chaoin and find Peig Sayers' story in it

Cross to the Great Blasket Island itself, weather permitting, and walk the abandoned village

Read a passage of Tomás Ó Criomhthain or Muiris Ó Súilleabháin while you are on the island or looking at it

From Dún Chaoin look across the sound and pick out the line of the abandoned village on the island's slope

Stand at Dún Chaoin pier, the mainland end of the evacuation route used in 1953

The Great Blasket produced an extraordinary body of literature for a place that never held more than a couple of hundred people — Peig Sayers, Tomás Ó Criomhthain and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin all wrote in Irish about a life that was already ending, and Peig's memoir became required reading for generations of Irish schoolchildren, to their lasting resentment. The island was evacuated in 1953. The Blasket Centre at Dún Chaoin tells it from the mainland, and boats cross when the weather allows.

The Blaskets: Island Writers of the Dingle Gaeltacht

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

Tour Skellig Six18 Distillery, named for the 618 steps on Skellig Michael

See the old RIC barracks and find out what happened here in 1867

Walk into the Cahergal and Leacanabuaile stone forts

See Ballycarbery Castle from the roadside viewing area

Find the O'Connell memorial facing his birthplace at Carhan

Cahersiveen, on the Ring of Kerry, is where the first shots of the Fenian Rising were fired in 1867, and its old Royal Irish Constabulary barracks of the 1870s, built in the Schloss style of its architect Enoch Trevor Owen, is now a heritage centre. The town's church is dedicated to Daniel O'Connell, with a memorial facing his birthplace at Carhan. Just outside the town are two stone forts close together, Cahergal and Leacanabuaile, and the ruin of Ballycarbery Castle, a 16th-century tower house. Skellig Six18, the distillery on the edge of the town, takes its name from the 618 steps up Skellig Michael.

Cahersiveen: Skellig Six18 and the Stone Forts

Find the Tetrapod Trackway on Valentia's northeast coast — footprints left by an early four-legged vertebrate 385 million years ago, among the oldest tracks of their kind anywhere

Go up to the slate quarry at Dohilla — a working quarry, so check access — which supplied slate for the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey

Visit Valentia Island Lighthouse at Cromwell Point, guarding the northern entrance to Valentia Harbour

Cross the bridge from Portmagee, one of only two ways to reach Valentia along with the summer car ferry

About 385 million years ago something with four legs walked across wet mud on what is now the north-east coast of Valentia, and the prints set. They are among the oldest tracks of a land vertebrate found anywhere on Earth — the moment life came out of the water, recorded in stone you can stand beside. The island has a second seam of history in it: the slate quarry at Dohilla, opened in 1816, shut for most of the 20th century and worked again since the 1990s, supplied the roofs of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. You reach Valentia by the bridge at Portmagee or, in summer, the car ferry.

385-Million-Year-Old Footprints on Valentia

Tour Teeling Distillery in the Liberties, the first new whiskey distillery to open in Dublin in over 125 years when it opened in 2015

Visit the Irish Whiskey Museum on Grafton Street for a guided tasting through Irish whiskey's history

Tour Roe & Co Distillery on James's Street, built inside the old Guinness power station

Compare a pot-still Teeling whiskey with a Roe & Co blend, made a few streets apart in the same historic distilling district

The Liberties once held the largest distillery in the world, and Dublin at its peak had dozens of them, and then Dublin distilling collapsed so completely that when Teeling opened in 2015 it was the first new distillery in the city in over 125 years. Roe & Co is built inside the old Guinness power station on James's Street, a few streets away. Between the two, the Irish Whiskey Museum on Grafton Street walks you through how an industry that size disappeared and how it came back. Taste a pot still against a blend, made within a few streets of each other, and you can tell them apart.

Dublin's Three Distilleries: Teeling, Roe & Co and the Whiskey Museum

Attend the Galway International Oyster Festival in the city on its last-weekend-of-September dates

Watch or enter the World Oyster Opening Championship, held at the festival since its early years

Taste oysters at the festival stalls and compare a native flat oyster to a Pacific rock oyster

Walk the Claddagh and Nimmo's Pier and look out over the bay the oysters come from — the native beds are out at Clarinbridge

The Galway International Oyster Festival began in 1954 when Great Southern Hotel manager Brian Collins and the owners of Paddy Burke's bar in Clarenbridge held the first oyster-opening contest for 34 people. The festival marquee stands at the Galway City Fishmarket by the Spanish Arch on the last weekend of September, and the World Oyster Opening Championship — the sport's original world title — is still decided there each year.