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

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

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

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

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.

Bunratty: The Castle, the Banquet and the Folk Park

Stand inside the Grange stone circle, the largest in Ireland

Walk the lake shore under Knockadoon Hill where people have lived for six thousand years

Find Rannach Chruim Duibh, the 40-tonne stone in the circle, and the smaller second circle nearby

Come at the summer solstice, when the sunrise aligns on the circle's entrance

Lough Gur is a horseshoe of water at the foot of Knockadoon Hill, and people have lived around it continuously for something like six thousand years — it is one of the most important archaeological landscapes in Ireland. The Grange stone circle nearby is the largest in the country — Lios na Gráinsí, a ring of standing stones banked with earth, whose entrance is aligned on the rising sun at the summer solstice. Its biggest stone, Rannach Chruim Duibh, stands over 4 metres and weighs 40 tonnes. There are also wedge tombs, hut sites and a crannog around the lake.

Lough Gur: The Largest Stone Circle in Ireland

Take the seasonal ferry from Kilrush Marina across the Shannon Estuary to Scattery Island, a crossing of about 2.5km, roughly half an hour each way

Find Scattery's round tower, entered at ground level rather than high in the wall, standing over St Senan's 6th-century monastery

Walk between the ruins of Scattery's monastic churches, founded around 534 AD by St. Senan and once numbering five separate churches on the island

At the island's south end, find the remains of the Napoleonic gun battery, one of six built along the estuary against a French landing built to watch over the Shannon's shipping lane

Before or after the crossing, walk Kilrush Marina and check the tide gauge — the Shannon Estuary has one of the largest tidal ranges of any Irish estuary

Scattery Island sits 3km out from Kilrush in the mouth of the Shannon Estuary, reachable only by boat. St. Senan founded a monastery here around 534 AD, and its round tower, its doorway at ground level rather than high in the wall, is visible from the mainland long before you land.

Shannon Estuary Coastal Navigation

Hire a boat at Carrick-on-Shannon for two or three days — no licence needed, instruction included

Navigate north through Battlebridge towards Spencer Harbour on Lough Allen

Work your first lock with the lock keeper talking you through it

Moor overnight at a designated riverside mooring and cook aboard

Work the locks yourself on the return leg without assistance

Carrick-on-Shannon is the centre of inland boating in Ireland, and a hire boat needs no licence — you get an hour's instruction and then the river is yours. Heading north from the town takes you through Battlebridge and on towards Spencer Harbour on Lough Allen, with three or four locks to work on the way. The first one is done with the lock keeper talking you through it; by the last you are doing it yourself, which is the actual achievement here.