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

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

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

See Leamy House on Hartstonge Street, the school McCourt attended — the museum that was in it closed in 2019 and its collection is now at the People's Museum

Walk the Angela's Ashes trail through the streets of the old lanes district

Find where the McCourt family lived, and see what stands there now that the lanes have been cleared

Go into St Joseph's Church, where McCourt was turned away when he went to be taken on as an altar boy

Read a passage of Angela's Ashes standing in the part of the city it describes

Frank McCourt's parents met in New York and came back to Limerick when the work ran out, sinking into the lanes with the alcoholism that shaped the whole book. His father left for the factories of wartime Coventry when Frank was eleven and rarely sent money home. Angela's Ashes came out in 1996 and took the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography the following year, for a memoir of exactly that — misery, squalor, and a comic timing that makes it readable. The city it describes has largely been cleared, which is part of what you are looking at: the lanes are gone, and the walk is about what replaced them.

Angela's Ashes: Frank McCourt's Limerick

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

Tour Thoor Ballylee, the 15th-century Anglo-Norman tower house Yeats restored in 1919 and lived in until 1929

Find where Yeats wrote The Tower, and read his inscription cut into the stone outside

Drive the three miles to Coole Park, Lady Gregory's estate — see the Autograph Tree where Yeats, Shaw and Synge cut their initials

Compare Thoor Ballylee's fortified tower with Coole Park's now-vanished house — only the tree and the walled garden remain of Lady Gregory's home

Yeats bought a derelict 15th-century Anglo-Norman tower house in Galway for £35, restored it in 1919, called it Thoor Ballylee and lived in it until 1929. He then wrote his way out of it: The Tower came out of these walls, and the tower and its winding stair run through the poems that followed, including The Winding Stair of 1933, by which time the family had left. He set his own inscription into the stone outside. Three miles away is Coole Park, Lady Gregory's estate and the seedbed of the Irish Literary Revival, where the house is gone but the Autograph Tree still carries the initials Yeats, Shaw and Synge cut into it.

Thoor Ballylee: Yeats' Tower

Climb through Bunratty Castle to the Great Hall and the rooms above it

Find out how the O'Briens came to hold Bunratty around 1500

Walk the village street and farmhouses of the Folk Park

Book the medieval banquet held in the castle in the evening

The castle at Bunratty is the fourth on the site; the present building was begun in the 15th century, and around 1500 it passed to the O'Briens, the most powerful clan in Munster and later Earls of Thomond. It was bought and restored in the 1950s by the 7th Viscount Gort with the Office of Public Works and furnished with 15th- and 16th-century pieces. Since 1963 it has held medieval banquets in its hall at night, begun to give travellers from Shannon Airport something to do. Around it, Bunratty Folk Park recreates 19th-century rural Ireland, with farmhouses and a village street of shops, a pub and a school.