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

Visit the Carrickmacross Lace Gallery and watch the appliqué technique being worked

Find out how a famine relief scheme in 1846 turned into a craft that outlived the estates that started it

Look closely enough at a piece to see how the design is applied to net rather than woven

Mrs Grey Porter of Donaghmoyne brought this lace to Ireland around 1820 and taught it to local women so they could earn a little money. It went nowhere until 1846, when the managers of the Bath and Shirley estates set up a lace school at Carrickmacross as a way of keeping starving tenants alive through the Famine. It has been made here ever since. A square of Carrickmacross lace that had belonged to Queen Mary was sewn onto the front of Diana Spencer's wedding dress, and Catherine Middleton's dress in 2011 used lace inspired by it.

Carrickmacross Lace: From Famine Relief to a Royal Wedding

Climb Castletown Mount, the Norman motte traditionally held to be Cúchulainn's Dún Dealgan

Go through the County Museum in the restored Dundalk Distillery buildings

Find An Táin Arts Centre and the epic it takes its name from

Look north into the Cooley Mountains where the Táin is set

Dún Dealgan — Dundalk — is named for the fort of Dealga, and tradition puts Cúchulainn's home at Castletown Mount just outside the town — what stands there is a Norman motte-and-bailey of about 1185, with the ruin of Byrne's Folly on top, though a ringfort is said to have been there before it, which is why the whole Cooley landscape around it is the setting for the Táin Bó Cúailnge. The town sits on the Castletown River halfway between Dublin and Belfast, seven kilometres from the border. The County Museum occupies restored buildings of the old Dundalk Distillery, and An Táin Arts Centre in the town hall is named for the epic.

Dundalk: Cúchulainn's Fort and the County Museum

Walk the river trail along the Cabra through the glen

Find the waterfall and the wishing well on the walk

Find the ruins of the old Cabra Castle — Fleming's castle — on the rise above the wishing well

Walk the full circuit and see how the drumlins run north into Monaghan from here

Dún an Rí — the fort of the king — is a wooded glen on the Cabra river outside Kingscourt, on the Cavan–Monaghan border north of Kingscourt, in the drumlin country at the south-eastern end of the county. There are waterfalls, a wishing well, the ruins of the old Cabra Castle — Fleming's castle — and trails through mature deciduous woodland along the river. It is small, the car park is pay-and-display, and on a weekday there is nobody in it.

Dún an Rí: The Forest Park at Kingscourt

Walk the shoreline trails through the old Blayney demesne

Bring your own kayak or canoe — there is no hire on site — and get out among the islands

Walk out onto one of the peninsulas and see how the drumlins shape the lake

Fish for pike or bream on Monaghan's largest lake

Lough Muckno is the largest lake in Monaghan and the town of Castleblayney sits directly above its western shore. The old Blayney demesne around it is now a public forest park of woodland, islands, inlets and shoreline, and enough water for rowing, angling and paddling. It is drumlin country, so the lake is a complicated shape with peninsulas and bays running in every direction.

Lough Muckno: Monaghan's Biggest Lake

Stand under the capstone and work out how 40 tonnes was lifted into place

Throw three stones onto the capstone and see whether they stay

Find the wedge tomb standing in the same field

Look across to the Cooley Mountains, the setting of the Táin Bó Cúailnge

Proleek is a portal tomb standing in the Cooley countryside — two portal stones, a backstone, and a capstone that weighs about 40 tonnes balanced on top of them. How it was raised is the question nobody has answered. Local tradition says that if you can land three stones on top of the capstone and they stay there, you get a wish, or you will be married within the year. The top of it is covered in the evidence of people trying.

The Proleek Dolmen: Land Three Stones and Make a Wish

Climb Slieve Gullion to the summit at 573m, the highest point in Armagh

Go inside the summit passage grave, the highest surviving one in Ireland

Find the small lake on the summit beside the cairns

Trace the circle of the Ring of Gullion ring dyke from the top

Slieve Gullion is a steep, flat-topped mountain of 573m, the highest point in Armagh, and it sits at the centre of a ring dyke — the Ring of Gullion, a circle of low hills formed by a collapsed volcanic structure and now an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. On the summit are a small lake and two ancient burial cairns, one of which is the highest surviving passage grave in Ireland. You can walk into it. The mountain is bound up with Cúchulainn in the Ulster Cycle, and the whole ring is visible from the top.

Slieve Gullion: The Highest Surviving Passage Grave in Ireland

Book the guided tour and walk the cliff path bolted to the basalt

Cross the tubular bridge, the signature structure of Wise's 1902 design

Go through the tunnel cut into the cliff and past the sea caves

Look for seabirds nesting on the rock faces above and below the path

Berkeley Deane Wise, a railway engineer, bolted a walkway onto the basalt cliffs of Islandmagee and opened it to the public in 1902 at sixpence a head. Newspapers called it a perfect marvel of engineering and said its beauty baffled all description. The railway ran out of money in the 1930s, the path closed before the war, reopened briefly, and shut again in 1954. It came back in August 2015 as a guided tour across bridges, past caves and through a tunnel cut in the rock, with the sea directly below your feet.

The Gobbins: A Path Bolted to the Cliff Face

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.