Walk the circles, alignments and cairns laid out across the cut bog

Find Bradley's Cairn, the round cairn with standing stones set into it

Follow one of the stone alignments and work out what it points at

Look at the peat face around the site and consider how much is still buried

George Barnett was cutting turf on the south-east edge of the Sperrins in the late 1930s when he started uncovering stones — 1,269 of them in the end. Beaghmore is a complex of seven low stone circles — six of them paired — with twelve cairns and ten stone rows that had been swallowed by blanket bog and preserved under it, excavated between 1945 and 1949 and taken into state care. The peat that buried it is the reason it survived, and there is almost certainly more of it still under the bog.

Beaghmore: Seven Stone Circles Under the Peat

Take the guided tour and stand in the mill when the beetling engines are running

See the water wheel on the Ballinderry River that drives the whole thing

Find out what beetling actually did to linen and why it mattered

Beetling was the last stage of making linen: the woven cloth was pounded by rows of heavy wooden hammers to close the weave and beat a sheen into it, and the noise was deafening. Hugh Faulkner and his brother set up a bleaching works on the Ballinderry River near Cookstown in 1764, and the water-powered mill that grew out of it is the last functioning beetling mill in the United Kingdom. The National Trust runs it, and they still start the engine.

Wellbrook: The Last Working Beetling Mill in the UK

Sit in the walled butterfly garden on a warm still day and count the species

Walk the shrub gardens and the lake in the old demesne

Walk the forest trails around the grounds

Find what is left of the manor house itself

Drum Manor is a quiet old estate outside Cookstown where the house is largely gone and the grounds remain — and inside one of the walled gardens they have planted specifically for butterflies, so on a warm still day in summer the enclosure fills with them. There are shrub gardens, a lake, and forest walks around it. It is a small place and it does one thing very well.

Drum Manor: The Butterfly Garden Near Cookstown

Climb Sawel from the Glenelly Road, following the fences over the bog

Walk the ridge from Sawel to Dart, the second-highest summit in the Sperrins

On a clear day, pick out the Foyle estuary, Lough Neagh and the Mournes from the top

Drive the Glenelly valley under the mountain

Sawel, at 678 metres, is the highest of the Sperrin Mountains and the highest mountain in Northern Ireland outside the Mournes; its summit is on the county boundary, with Londonderry to the north and Tyrone to the south. Dart, at 619 metres the second highest in the range, is along the ridge to the west. The Sperrins are an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, mostly moorland and blanket bog under rounded summits, and the usual loop goes up from the Glenelly Road, following wire fences that make a navigation line in any weather. On a clear day you can see north to the Foyle estuary and east across Northern Ireland to Lough Neagh and the Mournes. Golden eagles from the reintroduced Donegal population have been seen across the range.

Sawel and Dart: The Top of the Sperrins

Walk up to Tullyhogue Fort and into the ring of earthen banks on the hilltop

Find where the inauguration stone stood, outside the ring of banks rather than within it

Look out over the country the O'Neills ruled from this hill

Pair it with the Hill of The O'Neill at Dungannon to see both ends of the same power

Three kilometres south of Cookstown, on a low hill ringed by earthen banks and old trees, the kings of Tír Eoghain were inaugurated — not crowned in a cathedral but made king on open ground, in the Gaelic way, on the hill the Irish call Tulach Óg. The O'Neills were made here for centuries, the last of them Hugh O'Neill in 1595; Mountjoy's men smashed the inauguration stone, Leac na Rí, in 1602, and the Flight of the Earls five years later ended the Gaelic order in Ulster altogether. There is no building left. That is rather the point: what mattered was the hill, the ceremony and the people standing on it.

Tullyhogue: Where the O'Neills Were Crowned

Drive the forest road up through Gortin Glen

Walk a waymarked trail up out of the glen into the Sperrin foothills

Watch for deer in the conifer plantations

Get above the treeline for the view out across the Sperrins

Tyrone is the largest county in Northern Ireland and among the least walked, and Gortin Glen is where you go to have the Sperrins to yourself. Forest drives and waymarked trails run up out of the glen into the foothills, the views open out above the treeline, and there are deer in the park. On a weekday out of season you will meet nobody at all.

Gortin Glen: Forest Drives Under the Sperrins

Find the O'Cahan tomb inside the priory ruins

Look at the carved figures in the arcade beneath the effigy

Find the bullaun stone under the rag-hung thorn bushes outside

Look at how the 1100s priory sits on the foundations of older churches

The Augustinian priory at Dungiven was built in the 1100s on the foundations of earlier churches, and inside its ruins is the O'Cahan tomb, long said to be that of Cooey na Gall O'Cahan, who died in 1385 — though the effigy itself looks to be late 15th-century work, and may be a later man of the same family — one of the finest medieval tombs in Ireland, with the effigy above and a row of armed figures carved in the arcade beneath. Outside in the graveyard a thicket of thorn bushes is hung with rags: a bullaun stone sits under them, and people still come to it seeking cures for warts.

Dungiven Priory: The O'Cahan Tomb and the Rag Tree

Go through the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in the old church at Inniskeen

Walk the townland roads and drills that The Great Hunger describes

Read The Great Hunger or a passage of Tarry Flynn standing in the fields it came out of

Patrick Kavanagh was born in Inniskeen in 1904, the fourth of ten children, and kept goal for the parish football team before he got out. He wrote The Great Hunger about the life he left — a poem about a small farmer's sexual and spiritual starvation on land that gave nothing back — and it remains the least sentimental thing written about rural Ireland. Tarry Flynn came out of the same townlands. He is buried here, and the drills and hedges of the poems are still the ones you are looking at.

Inniskeen: Patrick Kavanagh's Stony Grey Soil

Climb the outcrop through the successive gatehouses to the keep on top

Stand where Dunamase passed to Strongbow in 1170 as part of Aoife's dowry

Look west across the plain to the Slieve Bloom Mountains from the summit

Trace the lines of the outer bailey walls in the grass below the keep

Dunamase is a limestone outcrop rising 46 metres straight off the Laois plain with a ruined castle on top and a view across to the Slieve Blooms. In 1170 Diarmait Mac Murchada handed it over, along with his daughter Aoife, to the Norman Strongbow as the price of military help — which is how the most important Hiberno-Norman fortification in Laois came to exist, and how the Norman invasion of Ireland got started. The O'Mores held it for centuries afterwards. It is free, unfenced and usually empty.