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

Arigna

Six nights across Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon, from the passage tombs of Carrowmore and Carrowkeel to the royal complex at Rathcroghan, with Boyle Abbey and a coal mine on the way.

The Passage Tombs of the West: Carrowmore, Carrowkeel and Rathcroghan

Find the MacDermott Roe crypt in Kilronan Burial Ground where O'Carolan is buried

Walk the lake shore at Ballyfarnon where he spent his last years

Learn the name of one O'Carolan tune before you come, and listen for it in a session afterwards

Find out what the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792 was for, and why it had to happen then

Come to Keadue for the O'Carolan Harp Festival held there each summer

Turlough O'Carolan was blinded by smallpox at eighteen and apprenticed to a harper by the MacDermott Roe family, who employed his father in Roscommon. He spent the next fifty years riding from house to house from one end of Ireland to the other composing tunes for whoever put him up, and he is the last great figure of a tradition that was already ending — harpers in the old Irish manner were still alive in 1792, when ten of them were gathered at the Belfast Harp Festival so their music could be written down before it went. He died on 25 March 1738 and lies in the MacDermott Roe family crypt at Kilronan, near Ballyfarnon. His tunes are still played nightly by people with no idea whose they are.

O'Carolan's Grave: The Blind Harper of the Big Houses

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

Walk the servants' tunnels under the site of Rockingham House — Nash's mansion of about 1810 burned in 1957 and came down in 1971, so you are walking under a house that is not there

Climb the Moylurg Tower, five storeys of concrete raised in 1973 on the footprint of the house, and pick out Castle Island and Trinity Island on the lake

Take the boat tour for McDermott's Castle and the 13th-century abbey ruins — neither island can be landed on, so the water is the only way to see them close

Walk the 300m tree canopy walk — timber and steel, rising 9m above the woodland floor, the first structure of its kind in Ireland when it opened; from the highest point look north across the lake toward the island cluster

Lough Key has two islands with centuries of history you can see but not set foot on: Castle Island held the Mac Diarmada kings of Moylurg for six centuries, and Trinity Island is where the Premonstratensian White Canons wrote the Annals of Lough Cé — and where a tomb is said to be that of a chieftain's daughter who died of a broken heart. The forest park around the lake is a destination in itself, built on the bones of a Palladian estate that burned in 1957 and left its tunnels, tower and walled garden behind.

The Islands of Lough Key: Una Bhán and the Annals

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.

Carrick-on-Shannon: Learning to Work the Locks

Find the Costello Memorial Chapel on Bridge Street and go inside

Stand in all 192 square feet of it and pace the aisle

Look down through the glass floor panels at the two lead coffins

Walk down to the Shannon quays in the town afterwards

Edward Costello built this chapel on Bridge Street in Carrick-on-Shannon for his wife Mary Josephine, and at 192 square feet it is said to be the second smallest chapel in the world. Both of them lie inside it in lead coffins under glass panels in the floor, one on each side of the aisle, which takes about four paces to walk. It stands between ordinary shopfronts and most people walk past it.

The Costello Chapel: 192 Square Feet on the Main Street

Walk the nave from east to west and find where the stone changes — Romanesque at the chancel end, Early Gothic at the west, sixty years of building in one glance

Find the modifications made by Elizabethan soldiers in 1592 when the abbey was requisitioned as a barracks — look for blocked arches, inserted floors and garrison adaptations made to medieval sacred spaces

Study the carved capitals in the nave arcade — Cistercian rule demanded plain stonework, but the local masons sometimes added faces and foliage anyway; find the ones that broke the rules

Walk or cycle the 3km to Lough Key — the Mac Diarmada kings built this abbey and ruled from Castle Island, and the distance between the two is the point

Founded in 1161 under the patronage of the Mac Diarmada kings of Moylurg, Boyle Abbey was one of the most powerful of Ireland's early Cistercian houses and is among the best preserved — and one of the few buildings where you can stand inside and read six decades of architectural change in a single glance along the nave.

Boyle Abbey: Where Romanesque Meets Gothic

Walk the length of the village, about a kilometre and a half, through its three sections

Look at how the houses are built — better than nine in ten are single-roomed byre houses, the cattle wintered at one end and the family at the other

At the eastern end, find the sweathouse — a low beehive of stone, the Irish equivalent of a sauna, used against rheumatism

At the western end, find the Slievemore megalithic tomb, a Neolithic tomb of roughly five thousand years ago that has never been excavated

Find out why the families who left in the 1850s came back up here every summer until the 1940s

On the southern foothills of Slievemore on Achill Island, a line of ruined stone houses runs about a kilometre and a half east to west in three sections — Tuar, Tuar Riabhach and Faiche — with 137 houses recorded by the Ordnance Survey. The archaeology puts the settlement no earlier than about 1750, and it was lived in the year round under the rundale system, the summer booley pastures being elsewhere on the island at Annagh, Dirk, Keem Bay and Bunnowna. It was abandoned through the 1850s — hurried by the Famine but not caused by it alone, with poor harvests, thinning soil and rising rents behind it — and most of the families moved down to Dooagh on the coast. Then they kept coming back: their descendants drove cattle up here every summer and lived in the old houses until the 1940s, the last place in Ireland or Britain where booleying survived.