Mountain bike the waymarked 15km Ticknock trail network, with views over Dublin City and Bay to the Wicklow Mountains

Ride the trails at Glencullen Adventure Park (The GAP), 20 minutes from Dublin city centre

Find the Ballyedmonduff Wedge Tomb, a Bronze Age burial site tucked into the forest near Ticknock

Compare Ticknock's purpose-built singletrack with Glencullen's more natural, technical trails

Dublin has purpose-built singletrack twenty minutes from the city centre. Ticknock carries a waymarked 15km network with the whole city, the bay and the Wicklow Mountains laid out below you on the descents. Glencullen Adventure Park, over the shoulder, is a paid downhill bike park with an uplift — steep and gravity-fed where Ticknock is flowing, and worth riding on the same trip to feel the difference. Tucked into the forest near Ticknock is the Ballyedmonduff Wedge Tomb, a Bronze Age burial that was on this hillside four thousand years before the trails were cut.

Ticknock and Glencullen: Mountain Biking Above Dublin

Find Cooldrinagh on Kerrymount Avenue, Foxrock — the house Beckett's family built in 1903, where he was born in the main bedroom in 1906

Tour Trinity College Dublin, where Beckett studied French and Italian before becoming a lecturer there himself

Cross the Samuel Beckett Bridge, Santiago Calatrava's harp-shaped structure over the Liffey, opened in 2009

Note that Beckett's plays are still regularly staged around Dublin — check the Gate and Abbey Theatre listings for what's on

Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in the main bedroom of Cooldrinagh, the house his family built on Kerrymount Avenue in Foxrock three years earlier, and it is still a private house on a suburban road. He read French and Italian at Trinity and came back to lecture there before leaving for Paris and writing the work that took theatre apart. The bridge named after him is Santiago Calatrava's, opened in 2009 and shaped like a harp laid on its side across the Liffey.

Beckett's Dublin: Cooldrinagh, Trinity and the Bridge

Hike the path from the Montpelier Hill car park to the summit, about 45 minutes on rough ground, with Dublin Bay opening up behind you

Inside the lodge, find the fireplace lintel — a standing stone robbed from the Neolithic tomb that topped this hill

Find the north gable window in the story Thomas Conolly told: a stranger at the card table, cloven hooves under it, and the man going out through the glass in flames

Stand at the summit and read Swift's verdict on the club — "a brace of monsters, blasphemers and Bacchanalians"

At the summit of Montpelier Hill, Speaker William Conolly built a hunting lodge in 1725 robbing stone from the Neolithic passage tomb that topped the hill — a nearby standing stone became the fireplace lintel. Shortly after it was finished a storm took the slate roof off, and Conolly replaced it with an arched stone roof, built like a bridge, which is still there. The lodge was later let to the Irish Hellfire Club, founded around 1737 by Richard Parsons, 1st Earl of Rosse, and the painter James Worsdale, whose members styled themselves satanists and whose reputation was so foul that Jonathan Swift called them "a brace of monsters, blasphemers and Bacchanalians."

Hellfire Club: The King of Hell's Lodge

Find the oratory from the outside — it is a small red structure near a playground and car park in Dún Laoghaire, with nothing on the exterior to indicate what is inside; stand outside it for a moment before entering, then step in

Pick out the three hands in the mural: Book of Kells knotwork and spirals, the Byzantine altar wall she painted first, and the Lynch Style of Celtic Art she learned from her own father, who originated it

Look at the seven windows by Joshua Clarke & Sons, the Dublin studio of Harry Clarke's father, and see how they were set to light the mural rather than compete with it

Find the Sacred Heart statue the whole thing was built around — sent in memory of local men who died in Belgium; she painted the wall behind it in 1920 and never stopped

The Oratory of the Sacred Heart in Dún Laoghaire is a small red building beside a playground that looks completely unremarkable from the outside. Inside, every surface is covered in a continuous Celtic Revival mural that Sister Concepta Lynch began painting in 1920 after a statue of the Sacred Heart arrived in recognition of the men of the area who fought and died. She painted for 16 years. The stained glass windows were made by the Harry Clarke Studio.

The Oratory of the Sacred Heart: Sister Concepta's 16-Year Masterpiece

Walk the Italian Garden down to Triton Lake

Find the Japanese gardens and the Pepperpot Tower

Find the pet cemetery the Wingfields kept

Walk to the foot of Powerscourt Waterfall, 121 metres high

Powerscourt, above Enniskerry, began as a 13th-century castle and was remodelled by Richard Cassels between 1731 and 1741; a fire in 1974 left it a shell until it was restored in 1996. The gardens are the reason to come. Mervyn Wingfield inherited the estate in 1844 at the age of eight, and when he came of age he made the gardens you see: the Italian Garden, Triton Lake, the Japanese gardens, the walled gardens, a pet cemetery, and the Pepperpot Tower, said to be modelled on Lady Wingfield's three-inch pepper pot. A few kilometres south, Powerscourt Waterfall drops 121 metres from the Dargle's hanging valley — the second highest waterfall in Ireland.

Powerscourt: The Gardens and the Waterfall

Find 33 Synge Street, George Bernard Shaw's birthplace — the museum inside has been closed, but the Victorian terrace house is still there

See the bronze Shaw by Paolo Troubetzkoy in the grounds of the National Gallery, which he left a third of his royalties, sculpted by Paolo Troubetzkoy and placed there after Shaw left a third of his royalties to the gallery

Compare Shaw's tenement-era Dublin, which shaped his social commentary plays like Pygmalion, with the grandeur of the National Gallery he cherished as a boy

Shaw is revived from time to time in Dublin — check the Abbey and Gate listings — check listings for what's showing

George Bernard Shaw was born in a Victorian terrace at 33 Synge Street in 1856 and grew up in a Dublin of tenements and genteel poverty — the material that produced Pygmalion. The house is still there, though the museum inside it has closed. What he said gave him his real education was the National Gallery, where he went as a boy; he left it a third of his royalties in his will, and the bronze of him by Paolo Troubetzkoy stands at the Clare Street entrance because of it. His plays are still in repertory at the Abbey and the Gate.

Shaw's Dublin: Birthplace and the National Gallery

Swim from the Forty Foot Bathing Place in Sandycove — the cold-water swim spot that opens Joyce's Ulysses — checking the tide before jumping from the rocks

Progress to Seapoint, on the shore between Blackrock and Monkstown, a longer sandy-entry swim used year-round by Dublin's sea-swimming community

Finish at the Vico Baths below Vico Road in Dalkey, historically known as the Gentleman's Bathing Place

Compare the three swim spots — Sandycove's rocks, Seapoint's sand, and Dalkey's cliffs — and note which entry and exit you found hardest

Dublin's coastline has three well-known cold-water swim spots within a few kilometres of each other: the Forty Foot at Sandycove, made famous by the opening page of Joyce's Ulysses; Seapoint's long sandy entry; and the Vico Baths below Dalkey's cliffs. Together they make a sea-swimming circuit you can do in a morning — no wetsuit required, but check the tide first.

The Forty Foot: Dublin's Cold-Water Swims

Find the 12th-century Romanesque doorway on the Aghadoe Cathedral ruins, carved with chevron and rope-pattern mouldings, then walk to the adjoining round tower stump

From the Aghadoe viewpoint beside the ruins, identify Lough Leane, Innisfallen Island and the MacGillycuddy's Reeks in the distance

Book a treatment at the Spa at Aghadoe, in the hotel on the same ridge as the ruins

Aghadoe, a low ridge above Killarney, drew visitors long before there was a spa: the ruined cathedral and round tower here mark a monastery said to have been founded by St Finian the Leper in the seventh century, with the first stone church going up around 1027, and the adjoining viewpoint looks straight down onto Lough Leane, Innisfallen Island and the MacGillycuddy's Reeks. The Spa at Aghadoe, in the Aghadoe Heights Hotel, now shares the same ridge and the same view.

Aghadoe Heights: Spa and the Round Tower Above the Lakes

Take a seaweed bath at Voya in Strandhill, reviving a tradition of Sligo bathhouses that goes back to 1912

Walk Strandhill Beach right outside, one of Ireland's best-known surf beaches beneath Knocknarea

Look up at Knocknarea's summit cairn from the beach — the unexcavated cairn linked to Queen Maeve

Find out how Voya founder Neil Walton brought the seaweed-bathing tradition back to his home town in 2000

Sligo had a string of seaweed bathhouses along this coast from 1912, and by the end of the century they had all but gone. Neil Walton brought the tradition back to his own town in 2000, and Voya now runs hot seawater baths with fresh-cut Atlantic seaweed steeped in them, which is exactly what the Victorian bathhouses did. It sits directly behind Strandhill beach, one of the best-known surf breaks in the country, with the unexcavated cairn on top of Knocknarea — said to be Queen Maeve's grave — looking down on the whole thing.