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

Bantry and Glengarriff

Cork (Ringaskiddy)

Ten nights in a loop from Cork: Kinsale and Baltimore on the West Cork coast, Garnish Island at Glengarriff, Killarney's lakes, three nights in Dingle with the Blaskets, then Blarney and the English Market.

West Cork and Kerry from Cork

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

Find out what happened in Baltimore on 20 June 1631

Go into Dún na Séad, the O'Driscoll castle over the harbour

Walk out to the Baltimore Beacon, Lot's Wife, on the headland

Take the ferry to Sherkin and find the Franciscan friary of 1460

Eat oysters or mussels from Roaringwater Bay

On 20 June 1631 pirates from Algiers, led by the Dutch renegade Murad Reis the Younger, landed at Baltimore and carried off at least 107 people into slavery — the largest Barbary raid on Ireland. The village's Irish name, Dún na Séad, the fort of the jewels, is the name of the O'Driscoll castle above the harbour, which has been restored and is open. At the harbour entrance stands the Baltimore Beacon, known as Lot's Wife. The ferry crosses year-round to Sherkin Island, where a Franciscan friary of 1460 stands above the pier; the island is home to artists and writers and to mussel and oyster farmers.

Baltimore and Sherkin: The Sack of 1631 and the Island Friary

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

Stand at the Rapids and watch the tide pour in or out of the lake

Kayak on the lough — the still, warm water is the best way to see into it

Look into the shallows for the purple sea urchins and other species the lough is known for

Climb the Knockomagh Wood trail above the lake for the view down into it

Find the seawalls around the lough built as Great Famine relief work

Lough Hyne is a saltwater lake barely 800 metres by 600, joined to the sea by a narrow channel called the Rapids where the tide pours in and out twice a day. That constant flushing keeps the water highly oxygenated and unusually warm, and the result is a density and variety of marine life found almost nowhere else in these islands — which is why it became Ireland's first Marine Nature Reserve in 1981. Some of the seawalls around the lake and the Rapids were built as Famine relief work.

Lough Hyne: Ireland's First Marine Nature Reserve

Stay at least one night on Cape Clear Island, Ireland's southernmost Gaeltacht, reached by ferry from Baltimore all year, or from Schull in summer

Take the Fastnet Rock Lighthouse cruise from Cape Clear, passing Ireland's most southerly point

Pick up a few words of Irish from islanders — Irish is still the everyday working language here

Find the promontory fort at Dún an Óir, the Napoleonic signal tower and the island's early Christian sites

Cape Clear is the southernmost inhabited island in Ireland and a Gaeltacht island where Irish is still the everyday language, with summer colleges bringing students to learn it. That is the reason to stay a night rather than take the day boat: the island only sounds like itself once the ferry has gone. There are stone forts and holy wells on it from long before the language question arose, and boats run out from the island to Fastnet Rock, the last piece of Ireland the emigrant ships passed.

Cape Clear: A Night on the Southernmost Gaeltacht Island

Lie back on the granite plinth at the centre of the crater, head on the carved rest, and look straight up — the oval of sky reads as though it were level with the grass rim, and it works best at dawn and dusk

Walk the crater rim and look down at the plinth — the bowl was cut out of the hillside and the slopes graded to the inch

Walk to Lough Abisdealy and find Lios Ard, the high fort the estate is named after, two thousand years older than the artwork

Drive the 3km into Skibbereen for the Heritage Centre — this district had some of the highest Famine mortality in the country, and the mass graves are close by

At Liss Ard Estate outside Skibbereen in west Cork, American artist James Turrell built a land art installation in the 1990s: an oval grass crater 25 metres wide. At the bottom of the crater is a granite plinth built for two, lying foot to foot with your head on a carved rest, looking up at an oval of sky framed by the grass banks. The installation is designed so that the sky appears closer than it is — a perceptual illusion created by the shape of the crater and the horizon of the rim.

Irish Sky Garden: James Turrell's Crater

Go to one of the public recitals, lectures or céilís during the Willie Clancy week — the classes are for registered students

Go to a trad session in one of Miltown Malbay's pubs

Walk Spanish Point beach and find out which Armada ships were wrecked off it

Buy a tin whistle and learn one tune well enough to play it through

The Willie Clancy Summer School, held in Miltown Malbay every year since 1973 in memory of the uilleann piper Willie Clancy, is the largest traditional music summer school in the world: in the week beginning on the first Saturday of July nearly a thousand students come from all over the world for classes in Irish music and dance. Out on the coast, Spanish Point takes its name from ships of the Spanish Armada wrecked off it in 1588; its beach, over a kilometre long, is a Blue Flag strand and one of the better-known surf breaks in Clare.

Miltown Malbay: Willie Clancy's Town and Spanish Point

Book and complete the boat trip to Skellig Michael from Portmagee or Ballinskelligs — landings are weather-dependent and cancelled more often than they run

Climb the 618 stone steps the monks cut, to the beehive huts of the early medieval monastery at the top

Find the filming locations used for Ahch-To in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi

Look across to Little Skellig on the crossing, the largest gannet colony in Ireland and one of the largest in the world

Skellig Michael is a pyramid of rock eleven kilometres out in the Atlantic where monks built a beehive-hut monastery in the early medieval period and hauled every stone of 618 steps into place by hand. The Star Wars films put Luke Skywalker on those steps and the island has never been the same. Landings are capped, weather-dependent and cancelled more often than not, which is appropriate — the monks chose it precisely because it was hard to reach.