Check tide times, then swim the Pollock Holes — three natural rock pools on the Duggerna Reef accessible only around low water

Take the stairway down from the coast road to the Kilkee diving boards and jump the up-to-13-metre drop into the Atlantic, conditions permitting

Book a coasteering session with a Kilkee watersports operator, entering and exiting the sea around the reef's caves and gullies

Walk the cliff path west from Kilkee towards George's Head and look back at the horseshoe bay the reef protects

Kilkee's Duggerna Reef forms three natural rock pools — the Pollock Holes — exposed only around low tide, with a cliff-cut diving platform nearby allowing jumps of up to 13 metres into the open Atlantic. The reef acts as a natural breakwater, which is why the horseshoe bay is sheltered enough to swim when the open coast is not, and made Kilkee one of the bathing resorts on Ireland's west coast.

Kilkee: The Diving Boards and the Pollock Holes

Kilkee and the Shannon Ferry

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

Take a dolphin-watching boat out from Carrigaholt into the mouth of the Shannon

Walk out to Carrigaholt Castle, built by the McMahons around 1480

Watch from the pier for the dolphins' fins in the estuary

Find out what Carraig an Chabhaltaigh, the rock of the fleet, refers to

Carrigaholt, Carraig an Chabhaltaigh, the rock of the fleet, is a fishing village where the Moyarta river meets the Shannon estuary, about 15 kilometres from the tip of the Loop Head peninsula. The McMahons, chiefs of the Corcabascin peninsula, built its castle around 1480 to watch over the mouth of the Shannon, and the ruin still stands beside the pier. The estuary has a resident group of bottlenose dolphins, and boats go out from Carrigaholt to watch them. An Irish college was founded a mile west of the village in 1912.

Carrigaholt: Dolphins at the Mouth of the Shannon

Take the seasonal ferry from Kilrush Marina across the Shannon Estuary to Scattery Island, a crossing of about 2.5km, roughly half an hour each way

Find Scattery's round tower, entered at ground level rather than high in the wall, standing over St Senan's 6th-century monastery

Walk between the ruins of Scattery's monastic churches, founded around 534 AD by St. Senan and once numbering five separate churches on the island

At the island's south end, find the remains of the Napoleonic gun battery, one of six built along the estuary against a French landing built to watch over the Shannon's shipping lane

Before or after the crossing, walk Kilrush Marina and check the tide gauge — the Shannon Estuary has one of the largest tidal ranges of any Irish estuary

Scattery Island sits 3km out from Kilrush in the mouth of the Shannon Estuary, reachable only by boat. St. Senan founded a monastery here around 534 AD, and its round tower, its doorway at ground level rather than high in the wall, is visible from the mainland long before you land.

Shannon Estuary Coastal Navigation

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

Go up Loop Head Lighthouse, the tower of 1854, and look out over the mouth of the Shannon

Find out how the first light here, around 1670, was a coal fire on a cottage roof

Walk out to the Bridges of Ross and find the one sea arch the Atlantic has left

Watch for shearwaters and skuas passing the Bridges of Ross in late summer and autumn

Stop in Kilbaha, the last village on the peninsula

Loop Head is the headland on the north side of the mouth of the Shannon, at the end of a long, quiet peninsula with the Atlantic on three sides. The first light here, around 1670, was a stone cottage with a coal fire burning on its roof; a tower followed in 1802, and the present tower took over in 1854. It is one of the lighthouses of the Commissioners of Irish Lights, and visitors can go up it. On the north shore the Bridges of Ross were once a set of sea arches; the Atlantic has left one. In late summer and autumn it is one of the best-known seawatching points in Ireland, when shearwaters, skuas and petrels pass close to the shore on their way south.

Loop Head: The Lighthouse and the Bridges of Ross

Go to one of the public recitals, lectures or céilís during the Willie Clancy week — the classes are for registered students

Go to a trad session in one of Miltown Malbay's pubs

Walk Spanish Point beach and find out which Armada ships were wrecked off it

Buy a tin whistle and learn one tune well enough to play it through

The Willie Clancy Summer School, held in Miltown Malbay every year since 1973 in memory of the uilleann piper Willie Clancy, is the largest traditional music summer school in the world: in the week beginning on the first Saturday of July nearly a thousand students come from all over the world for classes in Irish music and dance. Out on the coast, Spanish Point takes its name from ships of the Spanish Armada wrecked off it in 1588; its beach, over a kilometre long, is a Blue Flag strand and one of the better-known surf breaks in Clare.

Miltown Malbay: Willie Clancy's Town and Spanish Point

Walk the covered walkway beside the well and look at what pilgrims have left — photographs of the sick, children's toys, medical bracelets, rosaries, written prayers, decades deep

Walk the pattern at the well itself — three times sunwise with prayers, the circuit that gives the word its name, from the patron saint's day

Find the statue of St Brigid at the entrance, and read how the goddess and the saint merged here — the hill above was a Lughnasadh harvest site before the Christian pattern took over

Drive the 2km to the Cliffs of Moher and walk north from the visitor centre to O'Brien's Tower, built in 1835 as a viewing platform for tourists

The holy well of St. Brigid at Liscannor in County Clare is one of the most heavily used pilgrimage sites in the west of Ireland, on ground linked to the pre-Christian Lughnasadh gatherings and a documented place of pilgrimage for centuries. The well sits in a stone-walled enclosure with a covered walkway along which thousands of votive offerings — photographs, rosary beads, statues, written prayers — have accumulated over generations. The site is one kilometre from the Cliffs of Moher.

St. Brigid's Well at Liscannor

Book a deep-sea angling charter out of Killybegs harbour, Ireland's largest fishing port, for pollack, mackerel, or cod on the offshore grounds

Fish from the harbour wall or pier rocks for mackerel on light tackle, the standard shore-angling catch in Donegal Bay

Practice catch-and-release on anything undersized or out of season, checking Inland Fisheries Ireland's limits before you fish

If your visit coincides with the annual Killybegs Hooked Seafood Festival, take part in its sea angling event alongside local anglers

Killybegs is Ireland's largest fishing port, home to charter operators running deep-sea angling trips for pollack, mackerel, and cod on the offshore grounds. The harbour also hosts the annual Killybegs Hooked Seafood Festival, which includes a sea angling event alongside its seafood competitions.

Killybegs: Deep-Sea Angling From Ireland's Biggest Port

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.