Drive or cycle the Healy Pass from Adrigole to the summit

Stand on the Cork–Kerry county line at the top of the pass

Look back down the road the way you came up

Find out what a Famine relief road was, and who it was meant to help

The Healy Pass climbs over the Caha Mountains from Adrigole in Cork to Lauragh in Kerry, crossing the county line at the top. The original track, the Kerry Pass, was cut during the Great Famine as a relief works scheme. It was improved and renamed for Tim Healy, Governor-General of the Irish Free State, who died in 1931 shortly after the work was done. It can be driven or cycled from either side.

The Healy Pass: The Famine Road Over the Cahas

Glengarriff and the Beara

Rosslare

Twelve nights in a loop from Rosslare to Kerry and back: Cork Harbour and Kinsale, three nights in West Cork around Baltimore, Garnish Island and the Healy Pass, Killarney, then Cashel and Kilkenny.

South to Cork and Kerry from Rosslare

Explore Lonehort Battery, the gun battery dug into the eastern end of Bere Island around 1900

Walk the Heritage Trail past Bere Island's four Martello towers and the garrison barracks, built after the failed French invasion attempt at Bantry Bay in 1796

Visit the Signal Tower at Derrycreeveen, part of the chain of coastal watch towers built in the early 1800s

Take the ferry from Castletownbere, the mainland fishing port serving Bere Island

In December 1796 a French invasion fleet of between 12,000 and 25,000 troops under General Lazare Hoche made for Bantry Bay, sent at the urging of Wolfe Tone, who had gone to Paris to argue that Ireland was the least defensible part of the British Isles. Most of the fleet got there. None of it landed — the weather was the worst recorded since 1708 and the commanders had been blown miles off course. Britain spent the next decade making sure of the coast, and Bere Island is what that left behind: four Martello towers and the barracks built for the garrison, a signal tower at Derrycreeveen, and at Lonehort a battery built around 1900 over an earlier Martello of 1805.

Bere Island's Napoleonic Defences

Take the boat out to Garnish Island and walk Harold Peto's gardens

Climb to the Martello tower on the island

Walk the old oak and birch woods of Glengarriff Forest

Find out why the house Peto designed for the island was never built

Ilnacullin, Garnish Island, in Glengarriff harbour, was bought from the War Office in 1910 by John Annan Bryce, a Belfast man, and Harold Peto designed its gardens; the mansion Peto drew for it was never built. Bryce's son Roland left the island to the Irish nation in 1953. George Bernard Shaw stayed, and there is a restored Martello tower from the Napoleonic Wars — straight-sided, like the others in Cork, rather than splayed at the base. Behind the village, Glengarriff Forest keeps some of the oldest and most extensive oak and birch woods left in Ireland.

Glengarriff and Garnish Island: A Garden on an Island

Go round Bantry House, still lived in by the White family

Walk the gardens the second Earl of Bantry laid out

Cook a meal at your pitch with cheese bought from the maker

Durrus sits ten kilometres from Bantry at the head of Dunmanus Bay, where the Sheep's Head and Mizen peninsulas begin, and gives its name to Durrus cheese, made at Coomkeen in three styles — the classic, the milder Durrus Óg and an oak-smoked version. Up the road, Bantry House has been owned and lived in by the White family, later Earls of Bantry, since the middle of the 18th century; it has been open to the public since the 1940s, and the second Earl and his wife laid out the gardens.

Durrus and Bantry: Farmhouse Cheese and the Whites' House

Walk the Lighthouse Loop out to the Sheep's Head Lighthouse at the western tip

Walk one full day-stage of the 88km Sheep's Head Way

Pick one of the twenty looped walks in the network and do it

Look across Bantry Bay to Beara and across Dunmanus Bay to Mizen from the ridge

The Sheep's Head is the narrow peninsula between Bantry Bay and Dunmanus Bay, and the Way is 88km of old tracks and roads running out from Bantry to the headland at Muntervary and back along the other side. It is a walking route built out of the paths people actually used, not one cut for tourists, and the network has grown to include twenty looped walks reaching east to Kealkill, Drimoleague and Gougane Barra, where it meets the Beara-Breifne Way. The Lighthouse Loop takes you the whole way to the light at the western tip.

The Sheep's Head Way: Eighty-Eight Kilometres of Old Tracks

Go round Derrynane House and find the relics of O'Connell's career

Find the library wing O'Connell built in 1825

Walk across Derrynane beach to Abbey Island at low tide and find the ruined abbey

Climb the stairways inside the walls of Staigue Fort, built around 100 BC

Derrynane House was the home of Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator, and it stands in 120 hectares of parkland on the Kerry coast, with relics of his life and career inside. His grandparents built or extended the house in the 1700s; O'Connell himself built the south wing facing the sea and the library wing in 1825, now the oldest parts that survive. Below it you can walk across Derrynane beach to Abbey Island and the ruined Ahamore Abbey, but only at low tide. Nine kilometres away, Staigue Fort was built in the late Iron Age, probably around 100 BC: a ring of dry stone 27 metres across, with walls up to 5.5 metres high and 4 metres thick, and inside an elaborate network of stairways leading to terraces.

Derrynane: O'Connell's House and Staigue Fort

Cross the Mizen Head footbridge, 45 metres above the Atlantic, to reach the signal station

In the signal station museum, find the exhibits on Marconi's wireless work at Crookhaven and Brow Head, 1901 to 1914

Find the 99 steps, the original stretch of the old access route down to the station

From the station, look out for the Fastnet Rock lighthouse, about 17 km out, on a clear day

Mizen Head is the Mizen of "Malin to Mizen", taken traditionally as the southern end of Ireland, though Brow Head just east of it is a few metres further south. A footbridge over a deep chasm — the original reinforced-concrete span went up in 1907, and the present award-winning bridge replaced it in March 2011 — crosses to a signal station that once tracked transatlantic shipping, with a museum telling the story of Marconi's wireless experiments down the road at Crookhaven and Brow Head between 1901 and 1914. Nothing stands between here and the open Atlantic, which is why this station spent a century logging the weather before anywhere else in Ireland felt it.

Mizen Head: Where Atlantic Storms Make Landfall

Complete the 85km peninsula circuit from Dingle via Slea Head Drive

Climb the Conor Pass on the R560 to 456m, one of the highest passes in Ireland on a tarred road

Handle the exposed Atlantic wind on the Slea Head coastal sections

Take the Conor Pass descent carefully — single track in places, with a rock wall on one side and a drop on the other

Finish back in Dingle town having taken in both the pass and the head in one ride

Eighty-five kilometres around the Dingle Peninsula taking in both of its hard parts. Slea Head Drive runs the exposed western edge where the Atlantic wind comes in unbroken and the beehive huts sit above the road. The Conor Pass on the R560 tops out at 456m, one of the highest passes in Ireland served by a tarred road, linking Dingle with Brandon Bay and Castlegregory over a single-track shelf cut into the mountain with a rock wall one side and a drop the other. The descent needs more care than the climb.

Slea Head and the Conor Pass: The Dingle Circuit

Walk out to the Marconi station site and the Alcock and Brown landing place in Derrygimlagh bog

Find the ruin of Clifden Castle, John D'Arcy's house

Cross the strand to Omey Island at low tide and find the medieval church dug out of the sand in 1981

Clifden was the idea of John D'Arcy, who first proposed a town on this coast in 1812 and built Clifden Castle, now a ruin, to the west. Four miles south, Marconi built his first high-power transatlantic wireless station, and on 17 October 1907 it opened the first fixed wireless service between Europe and North America; Jack Phillips, later the Titanic's chief radio operator, worked there. On 15 June 1919 Alcock and Brown ended the first non-stop transatlantic flight by landing their Vickers Vimy in Derrygimlagh bog beside it, mistaking the green bog for a meadow. West of town runs the Sky Road, and north at Claddaghduff you can drive or walk across the sand to Omey Island at low tide.