Visit the Shannon Pot - source of the mighty River Shannon

Walk part of the Cavan Way trail that passes the Shannon Pot

Find the legend of Síonnan and the Salmon of Wisdom told at the Shannon Pot, said to be the river's mythical origin

Drive round to the Fermanagh side for the Cuilcagh boardwalk, the Stairway to Heaven — a half-day walk in itself

The Shannon runs 360km and is the longest river in the British Isles, and it begins as a dark pool about sixteen metres across on the slope of Cuilcagh. The legend attached to it is older than the measurement: tradition says Sionann came to the pool against warning, the waters rose and drowned her, and the river carries her name ever since. The Cavan Way passes the pot. On the far side of the mountain, a half-hour drive round through Fermanagh, is the Cuilcagh boardwalk — the Stairway to Heaven.

The Shannon Pot: Where Ireland's Longest River Starts

Walk the Calf House Dolmen Trail from the interpretative centre

Find the Giant's Leap wedge tomb, one of the most intact in Ireland

Find the erratic boulders the ice left on the plateau

Look for the boulders carved with prehistoric rock art

Cavan Burren Park sits on a limestone plateau about 295 metres up under Cuilcagh Mountain, in the Cuilcagh Lakelands Geopark, and it is one of the finest prehistoric landscapes in Ireland. It holds wedge and portal tombs going back to the Neolithic — among them the Calf House Dolmen, the Tullygobbin wedge tomb and the Giant's Leap wedge tomb, one of the most intact wedge tombs on the island — with cist graves, relict field walls, hut sites, a promontory fort and boulders carved with prehistoric rock art. The ice left huge erratic boulders scattered across the plateau, and the Giant's Leap is the bed of a vanished river. Five trails run from the interpretative centre; entry is free and it is open all year.

Cavan Burren: Tombs and Erratics on the Limestone

Walk the boardwalk out across the blanket bog to the foot of the mountain

Climb the stepped section to the viewing platform at the top of the boardwalk

Look out over the Fermanagh lakeland and into Cavan from the platform

Find out why the boardwalk was built in the first place — to stop walkers destroying the bog

The Cuilcagh Boardwalk Trail was built in 2015 for an unglamorous reason: walkers were destroying the blanket bog underfoot, so a raised timber walkway was laid across it to protect the peat. Then it went viral, got nicknamed the Stairway to Heaven, and started drawing far more people than anyone planned for. The walk itself is genuinely good — a long approach across open bog, then a steep flight of steps onto the cliff-edged summit plateau of hard Lackagh Sandstone, with the Fermanagh lakeland spread out below.

Cuilcagh: The Stairway to Heaven Over the Blanket Bog

Take the underground boat journey along the Cladagh River when water levels allow it — the tour runs about 75 minutes either way

Walk the show cave passages beside the Owenbrean River, in a system first explored in 1895

Note the cave's full surveyed length — 11.5km, the longest known in Northern Ireland, of which the tour covers a small part

Book ahead — Marble Arch Caves tours are timed and can sell out in peak season

Marble Arch was first explored in 1895 by Édouard-Alfred Martel and the Dublin naturalist Lyster Jameson, and when the underground water levels allow, the tour still starts the way the cave does — by boat along the underground Cladagh River. Otherwise you walk the passages beside the Owenbrean under the Fermanagh hills. The whole trip takes about 75 minutes and covers a small part of the 11.5km surveyed so far, the longest known cave system in Northern Ireland. Tours are timed and sell out in season, so book before you drive out.

Marble Arch Caves: The Cladagh River Boat Journey

Walk out to the Irish Yew, about a mile south-east of the house in the old 18th-century gardens, and stand under the parent of almost every one in the world

Work out why a tree that cannot set viable seed is now on every continent

Tour the 18th-century house built by the Cole family, Earls of Enniskillen

Walk the estate towards Cuilcagh, where the two saplings were found in 1767

In 1767 a farmer called George Willis found two odd yew saplings on Cuilcagh mountain — upright, columnar, nothing like a normal yew. One died. The other was planted at Florence Court and is still alive. Because the Irish Yew cannot be grown from seed and propagates only from cuttings, almost every Irish Yew in every graveyard and garden in the world is a cutting from a cutting from that one tree. The house it stands behind was built by the Cole family and named for Florence Bourchier Wrey, who died in 1718.

Florence Court: The Mother of Every Irish Yew

Climb Sliabh an Iarainn to 585m above Lough Allen

Look down on the drumlin field the glaciers left in the lowlands

Find the iron workings the mountain is named for

Walk or drive the Lough Allen shore below the mountain

Sliabh an Iarainn means the iron mountain, and it is named for what was taken out of it — ore worked here for centuries, feeding the ironworks that gave this corner of Leitrim its industry. It rises 585 metres east of Lough Allen, part of the Cuilcagh range, and the ice that shaped it heaped the lowlands below into thousands of drumlins. In legend it is where the Tuatha Dé Danann first landed in Ireland.

Sliabh an Iarainn: The Iron Mountain Over Lough Allen

Go underground on the tour, where many of the guides are former Arigna miners

Find the seam markings on the tunnel wall and picture shovelling coal out of a space you cannot sit up in

Find the miners' lamp rack at the surface and ask what a lamp left hanging at the end of a shift meant

Go through the photographs of the last working years and find someone named in them

On the slopes of Kilronan Mountain above Lough Allen, coal was worked in seams 16 to 20 inches wide — among the narrowest known anywhere — with the miners lying on their sides to shovel it out. Coal has been worked here since the 1700s, on a hillside where iron was smelted a century before that, and it kept going until 1990, when the good coal ran out; the power station it fed burned through the last of the stockpile and shut soon after. The Arigna Mining Experience, built at Ireland's last working coal mine, takes you into the main tunnel — four feet high when it was worked, and widened since — and many of its guides are men who worked the seams themselves.

Arigna: The Mine You Worked Lying Down

Walk among the ruins of the churches of Diarmaid's monastery, founded in 560

Find the place on the shore where legend says Medb was killed

Look back across the lough to the Longford and Roscommon shores

Inchcleraun — Inis Cloithrinn, Clothru's island — is a 143-acre island in the middle of Lough Ree, and Diarmaid the Just founded a monastery on it in 560. Between 800 and 1300 its churches were plundered and burned again and again, and they stand in ruins. Legend says Queen Medb retired here and was killed on the shore by a stone — or in another version a lump of cheese — slung from the Longford side; one point is still called Grianan Meva, Medb's sunny place. Its other name, Quaker Island, comes from a Quaker who once owned it.

Inchcleraun: Diarmaid's Monastery on Lough Ree

Go through the Seamus Heaney HomePlace centre in Bellaghy

Walk the Heaney trail through the townland landscape of the poems

Find Mossbawn, the farm where Heaney grew up

See Anahorish, the school he was educated at and named a poem after

Visit St Mary's Church in Bellaghy, where Heaney is buried

Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for poems that mostly come out of a few square miles of County Derry farmland — the farm at Mossbawn, the school at Anahorish, the bog, the water pump, his father digging. HomePlace in Bellaghy is built around that material, with his desk, his notebooks and his voice reading the poems. Heaney is buried at St Mary's in Bellaghy, a few minutes' walk from it, under a stone carrying a line of his own.