Cycle the towpath west out of Mullingar towards Ballynacargy

Count the locks you pass and find out how the canal climbs

Find out why a canal that took 27 years to build was sold to a railway company

The Royal Canal took 27 years to build and reached the Shannon in 1817, and its towpaths now make the Royal Canal Greenway, opened officially in March 2021 as the longest greenway in Ireland, from Maynooth to Cloondara. The railway to Mullingar was laid beside the canal, and the two run side by side as far as the town. West of Mullingar the greenway follows the canal towards Ballynacargy.

The Royal Canal Greenway: Mullingar to Ballynacargy

Walk the front of Belvedere House and find out what the Rochforts did to each other

Walk to the Jealous Wall and find out who it was built to shut out

Cycle the Old Rail Trail west out of Mullingar

Belvedere, on the north-east shore of Lough Ennell eight kilometres from Mullingar, was built in 1740 by Richard Cassels as a hunting lodge for Robert Rochfort, later Earl of Belvedere. Rochfort had locked his wife up at their old house at Gaulstown over an alleged affair with his brother Arthur, and at Belvedere he built the Jealous Wall, a mock-ruin folly said to be the largest in Ireland, to block his view of his other brother's house. The house has Rococo plasterwork ceilings by Barthelemij Cramillion and a Victorian walled garden. The Old Rail Trail, the greenway on the old Midland Great Western line, starts at Mullingar.

Belvedere and the Old Rail Trail: The Jealous Wall

Book a guided tour — the only way onto the hill — and find Ail na Míreann, the Stone of the Divisions, where the provinces were said to meet

Climb to the top and count how many counties you can pick out

Walk the ring barrows and enclosures across the hill

Come at Bealtaine for the fire festival held on the hill

Uisneach sits near the geographical centre of Ireland and in mythology it is the symbolic centre of the island — the place of assembly, associated with the druids and with the festival of Bealtaine, and said to be the burial place of the Tuatha Dé Danann. On the slope lies Ail na Míreann, the Stone of the Divisions, a vast glacial boulder said to mark where the borders of all the provinces met. It is nicknamed the Cat Stone because it is supposed to look like a sitting cat. On a clear day you can see a large part of the country from the top.

The Hill of Uisneach: The Stone of the Divisions

Walk the walled gardens laid out in the early 19th century

Find the limestone grotto and the ornamental lakes in the grounds

Walk the woodland garden and the Chinese and Tibetan plantings

See the Gothic front of a house of over 120 rooms still lived in by the same family

Tullynally — Pakenham Hall — stands outside Castlepollard and has been home to the Pakenhams, Earls of Longford, for over 350 years. The Gothic house runs to more than 120 rooms and is one of the largest castellated houses in Ireland still lived in by the family that built it. Twelve acres of parkland and garden surround it: woodland gardens, walled gardens laid out in the early 19th century, a limestone grotto and ornamental lakes.

Tullynally: 120 Rooms and Twelve Acres of Garden

At the west doorway of St Féichín's church, built about AD 900, touch the massive lintel cut with a Greek cross in a circle — tradition says Féichín raised it by prayer after the workmen failed

Climb the Ankerland above the churches to the 15th-century anchorite's tower, and find the inscription to Patrick Beglin, sealed in the cell until he died in 1616

At Tobernacogany Well, find the Money Tree — pilgrims drove so many coins into the ash that it died, and the sapling replacing it carries rags and mementos

Walk the Benedictine priory on the valley floor, founded by the de Lacys as a daughter house of Saint-Taurin at Évreux, and raised on marsh that should never have held it

At the ruined mill, watch the stream that appears to run uphill — it rises underground from Lough Lene a mile away, and gives Fore its name, Fobhar Féichín

The village of Fore in County Westmeath holds seven miraculous impossibilities attributed to the 7th-century saint Féichín — a monastery on a bog, a mill without a race, water that flows uphill, water that will not boil, a tree that will not burn, a stone raised by prayer alone, and a hermit sealed inside a stone tower. The 3km looped trail connecting all seven takes about 90 minutes and passes through 1,400 years of Irish monastic history.

The Seven Wonders of Fore

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.

Kilbeggan: The World's Oldest Working Pot Still

Walk across the Whitworth Aqueduct where the Royal Canal crosses the River Inny

Find the Cistercian abbey ruins on the banks of the Inny

Walk the Royal Canal towpath east or west from the village

Work out how a canal is built to cross a river at all

Mainistir Shruthla — the monastery of the river. The Cistercians founded an abbey here on the banks of the Inny in 1150, from Mellifont, eight years after the order reached Ireland and the ruins are still on the river. Then in the early 19th century the Royal Canal arrived and had a problem: it had to cross the Inny. The answer was the Whitworth Aqueduct, carrying the canal over the river on stone arches, and the trade it brought kept the village going until the middle of the twentieth century.

Abbeyshrule: The Whitworth Aqueduct Over the Inny

Cycle the greenway from Rathkeale to Newcastle West on the old Limerick–Tralee line

Find out where Newcastle West — An Caisleán Nua Thiar, the new castle — got its name

Ride on west and through the 115-metre Barnagh Tunnel

The Limerick Greenway runs 40 kilometres along the old Limerick to Tralee railway line from Rathkeale to Abbeyfeale, and was finished in June 2021 as part of the Great Southern Trail. This is its best stretch: out of Rathkeale to Newcastle West, and on west to the Barnagh Tunnel, 115 metres long and renovated for the greenway, with a greenway hub beside it. Newcastle West, halfway along, sits in a wide bowl of a valley once known for its wild boar.

The Limerick Greenway: Rathkeale to the Barnagh Tunnel

Walk to Mahon Falls, an 80-metre cascade where the River Mahon plunges over sandstone cliffs on the Comeraghs' southern slopes

Walk in to the Coumshingaun corrie lake from Kilclooney Wood — the full ridge loop above it is a serious scramble, so judge it on the day

Compare the two Comeragh valleys — Mahon Falls' open waterfall glen against Coumshingaun's enclosed, ice-carved amphitheatre

Park at Kilclooney Wood or Kilclooney Bridge for the Coumshingaun approach, and at the signed car park off the R676 for Mahon Falls

The Comeraghs are sandstone, and the ice worked them into two completely different shapes within a few miles of each other. At Mahon Falls the river comes over the southern cliffs in an 80-metre cascade down an open glen you can walk into from the road. At Coumshingaun the ice dug a corrie instead — a lake sitting in an amphitheatre of cliffs that rise to the plateau above, one of the best known corries in Ireland. Doing both in a day shows you what a glacier does depending on which way the hill faces.