Drive Howth's coast road with stops at the cliff path viewpoints looking back at the Baily Lighthouse headland

Take the DART train from Howth to Dalkey along the curve of Dublin Bay, nicknamed the 'Bay of Naples'

Walk Dalkey Quarry, worked from 1815 to 1917 to build Dún Laoghaire Harbour's piers and once linked to the coast by a horse-drawn tramway called 'The Metals'

Finish at Killiney Hill's 1742 obelisk, built as a famine-relief public works project by local landlord John Mapas, for the highest viewpoint on the circuit

Dublin Bay curves from Howth Head round to Dalkey in a sweep locals have long nicknamed the Bay of Naples, and the DART runs the full length of it so you can do the whole thing without a car. What the train does not show you is on the land: Dalkey Quarry, worked from 1815 to 1917 to cut the granite for Dún Laoghaire's piers and linked to the harbour by a horse-drawn tramway called The Metals; and on top of Killiney Hill the 1742 obelisk, built by the landlord John Mapas as famine relief work, which has the best view on the circuit.

Howth to Dalkey: The Bay of Naples

Cycle from Dublin to Howth Harbour, or drive and rent bikes locally

Take the boat trip to Ireland's Eye, the small island a short crossing from Howth

Find the ruins of the 8th-century Church of the Three Sons of Nessan, the island's oldest surviving structure

Explore the Martello Tower, built in the early 19th century against a feared Napoleonic invasion, and cycle the Howth Head cliff loop back

Ireland's Eye sits a few minutes off Howth harbour and almost nobody who lives in Dublin has been out to it. On it are the ruins of the Church of the Three Sons of Nessan, an 8th-century foundation and the oldest thing standing on the island, and a Martello tower thrown up in the early 1800s against a Napoleonic invasion that never came. You can get to Howth by bike along the coast, take the boat across, and ride the Howth Head cliff loop on the way back.

Ireland's Eye: The Island Off Howth

Walk the full length of Dollymount Strand along the island

Look for seals hauled out on the sand at the Howth end at low tide

Walk the dunes and the salt marsh on the landward side and count the wading birds

Find out how Captain Bligh's 1801 survey accidentally created the island

Bull Island is five kilometres long, under a kilometre wide, and entirely unintentional. Captain William Bligh — of Bounty fame — surveyed Dublin Bay in 1801, and the sea wall built afterwards to stop the Liffey silting up caused sand to pile behind it instead. An island grew where there had been open water. It now carries more conservation designations than any other site in Ireland, and has been a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1981, inside the boundaries of a capital city. Seals haul out at the Howth end at low tide.

Bull Island: A UNESCO Biosphere Made by Accident

Find 15 Marino Crescent in Clontarf, where Stoker was born on 8 November 1847

Walk Trinity College, where Stoker enrolled in 1864

Visit Marsh's Library and find the three wire 'cages' readers were locked into from the 1770s to stop book theft

Walk through Dublin Castle, where Stoker spent ten years as a civil servant before he ever wrote Dracula

Walk the Georgian streets around Merrion Square and Dublin Castle after dark, the city he grew up in

Abraham Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent in Clontarf, and spent the first seven years of his life bedridden with an illness nobody ever diagnosed — then recovered completely the day he started school. He went up to Trinity in 1864, and afterwards spent ten years as a civil servant in Dublin Castle while moonlighting as a drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail: the two jobs that gave Dracula its administrative precision and its theatrical instinct. Marsh's Library, opened in 1707 as the first public library in Ireland, still has the three wire reading cages installed in the 1770s to stop readers stealing the books.

Bram Stoker's Dublin: Marino Crescent to Marsh's Library

Take the guided tour and count the sixteen rooms inside a building that looks like it has one

Find the four hollow columns that drain the roof and the funerary urns that are chimneys

Find the panelled front door, of which only two panels actually open

See how the subtly curved window panes hide the partitions, so one window serves several rooms

From outside, the Casino looks like a small neoclassical garden temple with one room in it. Inside there are sixteen, on three floors, and the whole building is a sustained architectural joke: four of the columns are hollow with a chain hanging inside each to carry rainwater down, the Roman funerary urns on the roof are working chimneys, only two panels of the front door actually open, and the window panes are subtly curved to hide the partitions behind them. William Chambers designed it for the Earl of Charlemont, it was finished around 1775, and Chambers never saw it — he was too busy in England to ever visit.

The Casino at Marino: A Temple Pretending to Be a Box

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 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

Tour the Irish National Stud and its Japanese Gardens, laid out 1906–1910 by Japanese horticulturists Tassa and Minoru Eida for Colonel William Hall Walker

Find out how the stud's 1909 Derby winner got the name Minoru

Find out what became of Shergar, the Aga Khan's Derby winner taken from Ballymany in 1983 — Gilltown Stud down the road is not open to the public

In 1900 William Walker, later Lord Wavertree, bought the Tully estate outside Kildare with his winnings from The Soarer's 1896 Grand National and made it a stud. In 1906 he brought in the Japanese gardener Tassa Eida, who spent four years with forty local labourers making the Japanese Gardens, and the stud's 1909 Derby winner, Minoru, was named after one of Eida's sons. In 1916 Walker gave all the bloodstock to the British Government, and it is now the Irish National Stud. At Gilltown, the Aga Khan's stud opens for the Irish Stallion Trail and keeps life-size bronzes of Shergar and Sinndar.

The Irish National Stud and the Japanese Gardens at Tully

Walk the 3.5 km Lakeside Walk from the Visitor Centre along Lough Beagh to Glenveagh Castle — the same ground the Derryveagh tenants were cleared from in April 1861

On the castle tour — self-guided most days, with guided tours limited and booked ahead — find the weighing chair in the foyer, where McIlhenny weighed every guest coming and going

Walk the Belgian Walk, a flagged terrace built in 1915 by Belgian civilian refugees displaced by the First World War, and photograph the terracotta azalea pots lining its length

In the walled garden, locate the Gothic Orangery designed by French decorator Philippe Jullian — photograph it against the exposed Donegal hillside visible beyond the garden walls

Scan the Derryveagh ridges for the golden eagles reintroduced to the park in 2000, and look for red deer on the open ground

John George Adair evicted 44 families, some 244 people, from this Donegal valley in April 1861 — clearing them under police escort after a quarrel over trespassing sheep and the killing of his Scottish steward — then built Glenveagh Castle on the emptied land between 1867 and 1873. Henry McIlhenny, a Philadelphia art collector who had rented the place each summer from 1933, bought the estate in 1938, sold the land to the state in 1975 and gave it the castle and gardens in 1979, using it himself until 1983. Golden eagles, extinct here for a century, were reintroduced into the park in 2000, and the valley holds the largest herd of red deer in Ireland.