Tour Skellig Six18 Distillery, named for the 618 steps on Skellig Michael

See the old RIC barracks and find out what happened here in 1867

Walk into the Cahergal and Leacanabuaile stone forts

See Ballycarbery Castle from the roadside viewing area

Find the O'Connell memorial facing his birthplace at Carhan

Cahersiveen, on the Ring of Kerry, is where the first shots of the Fenian Rising were fired in 1867, and its old Royal Irish Constabulary barracks of the 1870s, built in the Schloss style of its architect Enoch Trevor Owen, is now a heritage centre. The town's church is dedicated to Daniel O'Connell, with a memorial facing his birthplace at Carhan. Just outside the town are two stone forts close together, Cahergal and Leacanabuaile, and the ruin of Ballycarbery Castle, a 16th-century tower house. Skellig Six18, the distillery on the edge of the town, takes its name from the 618 steps up Skellig Michael.

Cahersiveen: Skellig Six18 and the Stone Forts

Find the Tetrapod Trackway on Valentia's northeast coast — footprints left by an early four-legged vertebrate 385 million years ago, among the oldest tracks of their kind anywhere

Go up to the slate quarry at Dohilla — a working quarry, so check access — which supplied slate for the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey

Visit Valentia Island Lighthouse at Cromwell Point, guarding the northern entrance to Valentia Harbour

Cross the bridge from Portmagee, one of only two ways to reach Valentia along with the summer car ferry

About 385 million years ago something with four legs walked across wet mud on what is now the north-east coast of Valentia, and the prints set. They are among the oldest tracks of a land vertebrate found anywhere on Earth — the moment life came out of the water, recorded in stone you can stand beside. The island has a second seam of history in it: the slate quarry at Dohilla, opened in 1816, shut for most of the 20th century and worked again since the 1990s, supplied the roofs of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. You reach Valentia by the bridge at Portmagee or, in summer, the car ferry.

385-Million-Year-Old Footprints on Valentia

Go down to Foilhommerum Bay, where the successful 1866 cable was landed

Find the cable station site at Knightstown and the story of the 1857, 1858 and 1865 failures

Work out what it meant that a message could suddenly cross the Atlantic in minutes

Visit the slate quarry at Dohilla that roofed the Houses of Parliament

In 1866 a cable was run from Foilhommerum Bay on Valentia to Heart's Content in Newfoundland, and this time it held. It took four attempts to get there: the 1857 try from Ballycarbery Strand failed, the cable landed at Knightstown in 1858 carried messages for about three weeks before it died, and the 1865 cable from Foilhommerum snapped in mid-ocean. Valentia went from a slate-quarrying island at the edge of Europe to one end of the first nervous system the world ever had.

Valentia: Where the Cable to America Landed

Book a licensed wildlife boat trip from Portmagee harbour that circles Puffin Island, a BirdWatch Ireland reserve where landing is discouraged in the breeding season to protect the breeding colony

Watch for grey seals hauled out on the rocks of Puffin Island and the Skellig channel, especially during pupping season, from mid-September through November

Keep to the operator's recommended distance from any hauled-out seal, and note how a pup's white natal coat differs from an adult grey seal's mottled grey coat

Walk Portmagee's pier and photograph the Portmagee–Valentia bridge, the crossing point many of these boat trips also pass under

Puffin Island, off Portmagee on the Iveragh Peninsula, is a BirdWatch Ireland reserve, acquired by its predecessor the Irish Wildbird Conservancy, and landing is discouraged in the breeding season to protect the seabirds — but grey seals haul out on the rocks around it year-round, with pups born from mid-September through November, most of them in October. Licensed boat trips circle the island from Portmagee harbour.

Puffin Island: Grey Seals off Portmagee

Get out on a clear moonless night away from the village lights and let your eyes adapt for twenty minutes

Trace the Milky Way from horizon to horizon

Find one of the reserve's designated viewing points on the Skellig Ring

Learn why Gold Tier is the highest dark-sky grade there is, and what it takes to keep it

The Iveragh Peninsula between Kells and Caherdaniel holds Ireland's first International Dark Sky Reserve, and on 27 January 2014 the International Dark-Sky Association gave it Gold Tier — the first Gold Tier Reserve in the northern hemisphere and one of only four in the world. There is no town light bleeding in from anywhere, the Atlantic is on three sides, and on a clear moonless night the Milky Way is not a faint smudge but a structure you can trace from one horizon to the other.

The Kerry Dark Sky Reserve: Gold Tier on the Iveragh

Walk the ruins of Ballinskelligs Priory by the shore

Walk out to Ballinskelligs Castle on its promontory, built by the MacCarthy Mór in the 16th century

Find out where the 1875 cable from Nova Scotia came ashore

Ballinskelligs — Baile an Sceilg, the town of the craggy rock — takes its name from the Skelligs off its coast, and it is in the Kerry Gaeltacht. By the shore stand the ruins of Ballinskelligs Priory, a house of Augustinian canons, and on a narrow, eroding promontory the MacCarthy Mór built Ballinskelligs Castle in the 16th century to guard the bay from pirates. In 1875 a transatlantic telegraph cable was brought ashore here from Tor Bay in Nova Scotia, 2,565 nautical miles away. Up the hill, the Cill Rialaig project keeps an artists' retreat in an old village.

Ballinskelligs: The Priory, the Castle and the Cable to America

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 the main street of Tubbercurry, County Sligo — the real town that played the fictional Carricklea

Ask in the bars on the main street which of them the crew filmed in, and have a pint in one

Find the church on the edge of the town that appears in the series

Drive out into the Sligo countryside around the town that frames the series' outdoor scenes

Sally Rooney's Carricklea is fictional; the town they filmed it in is Tubbercurry in County Sligo, and it looks on screen exactly as it looks standing in it. Locals will point out the bars and the church that were used, and the beach scenes were filmed far away on the Sligo coast, not here. The point of going is not the locations themselves but the recognition — that the ordinary main street of a small western town carried a story watched in a hundred countries.

Normal People: Tubbercurry and Carricklea

Order a pint at The Brazen Head's original curved bar on Lower Bridge Street

Find the framed material inside connecting the pub to the United Irishmen's 1803 rebellion planning

Ask the bar staff about the Robert Emmet Room that stood here until the late 1960s

Walk the five minutes uphill from the pub to Christ Church Cathedral and back, the route Dublin's medieval quays would have followed

The Brazen Head claims a licence going back to 1198, which is why it calls itself Dublin's oldest pub; the building you drink in is a coaching inn of 1754, on a site with a merchant's house from at least 1613 and a licence to sell ale from 1661. The pub's own story has Robert Emmet and the United Irishmen meeting here before the 1803 rebellion, and Jonathan Swift and Brendan Behan at its bar.