See Fiddaun Castle and its bawn wall from the roadside — it stands on private farmland with no public access inside

At Coole Park, find the Autograph Tree in the walled garden and pick out WBY, GBS, SOC and Synge cut into the copper beech

Find out what Lady Gregory did here — she co-founded the Abbey with Yeats in 1904, and the house came down in 1941, leaving the garden and the tree

Walk the shore of Coole Lake and watch for the whooper swans Yeats counted — fifty-nine of them, over the winter of 1916–17

Near Gort in south Galway, two sites from different eras sit within 10km of each other. Fiddaun Castle is a mid-16th-century O'Shaughnessy tower house, best known for its unusually complete inner bawn wall, standing on private farmland. Coole Park was the estate of Lady Augusta Gregory, patron of the Irish Literary Revival; in her walled garden stands a copper beech known as the Autograph Tree, carved with the initials of W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O'Casey, J.M. Synge and others.

Fiddaun Castle and the Autograph Tree at Coole Park

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

Launch from Kinvara, beneath the walls of 16th-century Dunguaire Castle at the water's edge

Kayak across Galway Bay toward Spiddal, a full-day open-water crossing

Land at Spiddal pier in the Connemara Gaeltacht, completing the bay crossing

Time the crossing around Galway Bay's tides, which can add several hours to the paddle at the wrong state of tide

A full-day open-water crossing of Galway Bay, launching in the shadow of Dunguaire Castle — a 16th-century tower house standing right at the water's edge at Kinvara — and landing at Spiddal pier on the Connemara side, in the Gaeltacht. The distance is not the difficulty. Galway Bay's tides run hard, and getting the timing wrong can add hours to the paddle or stop you finishing it at all, so this one is planned around the tide table before anything else.

Kinvara to Spiddal: Kayaking Across Galway Bay

Watch cattle being walked up onto the limestone for the winter

Come for the Winterage Festival around the October bank holiday weekend

Look at a grazed hill beside an ungrazed one and see what the scrub does

Find Arctic-alpine and Mediterranean plants growing within a metre of each other

Look into the grikes for some of the 24 fern species that grow down in them

Everywhere else in Europe, cattle come down off the hills for winter. In the Burren they go up. The limestone holds enough warmth and drains well enough that the uplands are the better winter ground, and that grazing is exactly what stops scrub taking over and shading out the flowers — which is why 23 of Ireland's 28 orchid species grow here, and why Arctic-alpine and Mediterranean plants share the same hillside. When farming industrialised and cattle moved to silage and sheds, the flowers began to lose. Restoring winterage is now conservation policy, and Burrenbeo runs a Winterage Festival around the October bank holiday to mark the cattle going up.

The Burren Winterage: Cattle That Go Up the Hill in Winter

Join a Wild Kitchen foraging walk in the Burren, learning to identify wild garlic, seaweed and other edible plants with a local guide

Cook and taste what you've foraged, prepared fresh the same day

Between October and April, spot cattle grazing the high Burren pastures — 'winterage', the reversed farming calendar of this limestone landscape

Finish with a foraged meal cooked outdoors, incorporating whatever was found that day

The Burren grows plants that have no business sharing a hillside, and a forager is the quickest way to understand why. A Wild Kitchen walk teaches you to pick out wild garlic, seaweed and the other edible things among the limestone, and then you cook and eat what you gathered the same day. Between October and April, look for cattle on the high pastures — that is winterage, the Burren's reversed farming calendar, where stock go up the hill in the cold months instead of down, and it is the reason the flowers survive.

Wild Kitchen: Foraging the Burren

Descend into Aillwee Cave, found in 1944 by a farmer following his dog — the tour covers about 300 metres of passage carved by ice-age meltwater

Walk Caherconnell Stone Fort, an exceptionally well-preserved medieval ring fort near Leamaneh Castle

Hike the Mullaghmore Loop in Burren National Park, through the karst landscape's terraced hills

Find the pavement clints and grykes on the Mullaghmore Loop, the fissured limestone that gives the Burren its name

A farmer following his dog into a hole in the hillside in 1944 found Aillwee Cave, a kilometre of passage carved by ice-age meltwater running through the limestone. Above it on the same hill the Burren does the opposite trick: bare pavement cracked into clints and grykes — Boirinn, the name, simply means the rocky district. Caherconnell nearby is an exceptionally well-preserved medieval ringfort near Leamaneh Castle, its drystone wall about 42 metres across and still standing some 3 metres high, and the Mullaghmore Loop in the national park climbs through the terraced karst.

Aillwee and Caherconnell: The Burren Under and Over

Stand back from the rope at Poulnabrone and look at the thin capstone, tilted as it was built rather than by erosion

Find the fossils in the limestone pavement around the dolmen, from the tropical sea that laid this rock down about 350 million years ago

Read the excavation board: about 33 people were buried here, with stone tools, quartz and bone jewellery and pottery

Come back after dark: there is no lighting at the car park, and the dolmen stands against the stars

Poulnabrone — usually given as the hole of the sorrows, though the name more likely comes from bró, a quernstone — stands alone in the Burren: two portal stones and a backstone carrying a thin, angled capstone, on a low mound in a flat karst limestone landscape that was a warm shallow sea some 350 million years ago. Excavated in 1986 and again in 1988, the tomb held the remains of about 33 people, adults and children, along with stone tools, quartz and bone jewellery and pottery; the burials date from the Neolithic, with a much later Bronze Age burial in the portico.

Poulnabrone and the Burren: The Hole of the Sorrows

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

Have a drink in Sean's Bar, certified by Guinness World Records in 2004 as the oldest pub in Ireland

Weigh up the claim: AD 900 by tradition, about 1725 by the official records

Walk out to the Shannon crossing in front of the pub, the reason Athlone is here

Walk up to Athlone Castle, built in 1210 to hold the same crossing

Sean's Bar on Main Street in Athlone, by the Shannon crossing, claims to have been founded in AD 900 and to be the oldest bar in Ireland, and in 2004 Guinness World Records issued it a certificate as the 'oldest pub in Ireland'. The official records disagree: the Record of Monuments and Places and the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage date the building to the 17th or 18th century — about 1725, possibly with fabric from earlier buildings — and a rental survey of 1738 calls it the Three Blackamoor Heads. When it was renovated in the 1970s, part of a back wall turned out to be wattle and wicker, and tavern tokens of uncertain age were found; they are now in the National Museum of Ireland.