Take a sailing lesson from Dromineer, home of Lough Derg Yacht Club since 1835

Try stand-up paddleboarding in Dromineer Bay

Find the ruined tower house on the harbour

Find out why a lake needs a lifeboat, at the RNLI station in the harbour

Dromineer lies on the shore of Lough Derg, eight kilometres north-west of Nenagh, and has sailed the lake since 1835, when Lough Derg Yacht Club was founded here — one of the oldest yacht clubs in the world. Its harbour is overlooked by an ivy-clad ruined tower house, begun as a 13th-century hall house and converted in the 15th or 16th century. It is also home to the Lough Derg lifeboat, the first inland lifeboat station in the Republic of Ireland. The bay is sheltered enough for a first sailing lesson or a paddleboard.

Dromineer: Sailing Lough Derg's Oldest Waters

Hire a day boat from Killaloe Marina and take it out onto the southern end of Lough Derg

Walk up to St Flannan's Cathedral in Killaloe and find the Romanesque doorway and the ogham-and-runic stone inside

Cross the thirteen-arch bridge on foot between Killaloe in Clare and Ballina in Tipperary

Find where the Shannon once carried steamers and cargo boats between Killaloe and Limerick, before the railways took over

Killaloe and Ballina face each other across the Shannon at the southern end of Lough Derg, one in Clare and one in Tipperary, joined by a long stone bridge. Before the railways came this was a working river: steamers and cargo boats ran between Killaloe and Limerick, and the whole midlands moved its goods by water. Twenty-five kilometres up the western shore, off Mountshannon, is Holy Island — Inis Cealtra — with its round tower and monastic ruins, reached by boat from Mountshannon rather than from here.

Killaloe-Ballina Twin Towns River Crossing

Visit Tuamgraney, Edna O'Brien's birthplace village, born at Drewsboro House in 1930

Visit St Cronan's Church in Tuamgraney, said to be the oldest church in Ireland still in use, and the heritage centre housed in it — early medieval stonework alongside 19th-century parish records

Read a passage from O'Brien's The Country Girls, set in this same rural East Clare landscape

Take the boat from Mountshannon out to Inis Cealtra, Holy Island, where she was buried in 2024

Edna O'Brien was born at Drewsboro House outside Tuamgraney in 1930, and when The Country Girls came out in 1960 the Irish censorship board banned it — one of thousands of titles banned under the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 — and the two novels that followed went the same way. The landscape she was writing about is still here: the East Clare farmland and the northern shore of Lough Derg. In the village, St Cronan's Church houses the East Clare Heritage Centre, and the building itself carries early medieval stonework.

Tuamgraney: Edna O'Brien's East Clare

Go round Portumna Castle and walk the corridor that runs its whole length

Walk the Lough Derg shore in Portumna Forest Park

Watch the swing bridge over the Shannon open for boats

Find the old Famine workhouse on the edge of the town

Portumna, Port Omna, the landing place of the oak, is where the Shannon opens into Lough Derg, on the crossing between Galway and Tipperary. Portumna Castle was built in the early 17th century by Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde, Lord President of Connacht — a semi-fortified house rather than a castle, with a three-metre corridor running its whole length — and was abandoned after a fire in 1826; its walled gardens survive. Beside it lies Portumna Forest Park. The bridge over the Shannon still swings open for boats, and the town's Famine workhouse stands on the edge of the town.

Portumna: The Earl's House on Lough Derg

Stand under the restored Leviathan, the largest telescope on Earth in 1845

Find Mary Rosse's darkroom in the science museum

Cross the wrought-iron bridge of 1820, said to be the oldest in Ireland

Walk the walled gardens and find the 300-year-old box hedges

The 3rd Earl of Rosse built the great telescope at Birr, and when it was finished in 1845 it was the largest on Earth, able to see further into space than any before it. His son, the 4th Earl, measured the heat of the moon. After 1908 the telescope fell into disrepair, the mirror went to the Science Museum in London and the iron frame was melted down around 1914 for the war; it was restored in the late 1990s, and you can stand under it again. The castle is still the Earl's home, but the demesne is open: a science museum with Mary, Countess of Rosse's darkroom, thought to be the oldest surviving in the world, a wrought-iron bridge of 1820, said to be the oldest in Ireland, and box hedges more than 300 years old in the walled gardens.

Birr Castle: The Leviathan of Parsonstown

Walk out to Cromwell's Castle, Cromwellian in origin from 1653 and rebuilt as a gun position in the Napoleonic wars, still standing over the Shannon crossing

Find the Salt Battery — Fort Eliza — with its emplacements for four cannons, and the Martello tower

Walk the harbour and the marina on the Shannon

Find Charlotte's Way, the house once called Hill House, where Charlotte Brontë's widower lived out his life, and the house Trollope lodged in

Banagher sits on one of the very few crossings of the mid-Shannon, and it is fortified out of all proportion to its size. Cromwell's Castle, built in 1653, still stands controlling the river; so do the Salt Battery — Fort Eliza — with emplacements for four cannons, Fort Falkland, and a 19th-century Martello tower, all of them put there to hold one bridge. Anthony Trollope lived here in the 1840s, and Arthur Bell Nicholls came back to Banagher after the death of his wife Charlotte Brontë and lived at Hill House until 1906.

Banagher: The Shannon Crossing and Cromwell's Bridgehead

Go through the Hunt collection room by room in the Georgian Custom House

Find the Picasso and the Jack B. Yeats among the medieval and ancient pieces

Look at how the collection is displayed as a house rather than a gallery

Walk the Shannon quays outside the Custom House afterwards

John and Gertrude Hunt spent a lifetime collecting and gave the whole thing to the Irish people. It started at the University of Limerick and moved in 1997 into the city's Georgian Custom House, and what is in there is extraordinary for a provincial museum — works by Picasso and Jack B. Yeats alongside medieval and ancient material, laid out in a house rather than a gallery so you come on things in ordinary rooms.

The Hunt Museum: One Family's Collection in the Custom House

Go into Camp Hill Cottage, the Mellon homestead, still on its original site

Walk the Old World street and find the Castletown National School

Board the Brig Union in the Ship and Dockside gallery

Find the Fulton stone house and the Appalachian log house in the New World

Come for the three-day Bluegrass Music Festival in September

Thomas Mellon was born on 3 February 1813 at Camp Hill Cottage in Lower Castletown, outside Omagh, and went to Pennsylvania as a child in 1818; he became a Pittsburgh judge and founded Mellon Bank. His grandson Matthew asked for the homestead to be restored, it opened to the public in 1968, and the Ulster American Folk Park grew around it, opening in 1976 with buildings dismantled across Ulster and North America and rebuilt here. The Old World has a street of houses, some brought whole from Sandy Row in Belfast, with a printing press, a bank and the old Castletown National School; the Ship and Dockside gallery takes you aboard the Brig Union, a full-size replica emigrant ship; and the New World has an American street, the 1720s Fulton stone house from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and an Appalachian log house.

Ulster American Folk Park: From Camp Hill to Pennsylvania

Tour Kilbeggan Distillery and find the pot still from the Old Tullamore Distillery, the oldest working pot still producing whiskey in the world

Find the 19th-century waterwheel on the River Brosna, restored to working order

Find the copy of the 1757 distilling licence on display

Taste two Kilbeggan whiskeys side by side

Kilbeggan Distillery on the River Brosna has held a distilling licence since 1757. It closed in 1957, but the licence was kept alive, and distilling started again on the site in 2007, fifty years on, around a copper pot still first installed at the Old Tullamore Distillery in the early 1800s — now the oldest working pot still producing whiskey in the world.