Listen for corncrakes calling from the meadows in late spring and early summer

Walk out to the Cromwellian barracks guarding the harbour mouth

Look for grey seals hauled out around the island's shore

Take the ferry from Cleggan and walk one of the island's waymarked loops

Inishbofin lies eight kilometres off the Connemara coast and much of it is a Special Area of Conservation, designated for its corncrakes and its seals. The corncrake is one of the great losses of Irish farming — a bird that vanished from the mainland as silage replaced hay — and Inishbofin is one of the few places left where you can still hear one calling from a meadow at night. At the harbour mouth stands a Cromwellian fort, built on the site where local tradition says a Barbary corsair had a stronghold before it.

Inishbofin: Corncrakes, Seals and Cromwell's Barracks

Walk out to the Marconi station site and the Alcock and Brown landing place in Derrygimlagh bog

Find the ruin of Clifden Castle, John D'Arcy's house

Cross the strand to Omey Island at low tide and find the medieval church dug out of the sand in 1981

Clifden was the idea of John D'Arcy, who first proposed a town on this coast in 1812 and built Clifden Castle, now a ruin, to the west. Four miles south, Marconi built his first high-power transatlantic wireless station, and on 17 October 1907 it opened the first fixed wireless service between Europe and North America; Jack Phillips, later the Titanic's chief radio operator, worked there. On 15 June 1919 Alcock and Brown ended the first non-stop transatlantic flight by landing their Vickers Vimy in Derrygimlagh bog beside it, mistaking the green bog for a meadow. West of town runs the Sky Road, and north at Claddaghduff you can drive or walk across the sand to Omey Island at low tide.

Clifden: Marconi, Alcock and Brown, and the Sky Road

Go round Kylemore Abbey, built as Mitchell Henry's castle in 1868

Walk the Victorian walled garden laid out in 1870

Find out how Belgian Benedictine nuns came to Connemara in 1920

Climb Diamond Hill from the Connemara National Park visitor centre at Letterfrack

Mitchell Henry, a wealthy London doctor, and his wife Margaret fell for this valley on their honeymoon around 1850, and in 1868 he built Kylemore Castle here; Margaret died of a fever caught in Egypt in 1874, and the walled garden was laid out by the head gardener James Garnier in 1870. In 1920 Benedictine nuns who had fled Belgium during the First World War founded Kylemore Abbey in the castle. Part of the old estate is now Connemara National Park, opened in 1980, with its entrance on the Clifden side of Letterfrack and a loop walk up Diamond Hill for the view over the park.

Kylemore and Connemara National Park

Climb Mweelrea to 814m, the highest point in Connacht

Look down the length of Killary Harbour from the summit

Walk part of the horseshoe over Ben Bury or Ben Lugmore

Look into the cliff-lined corries cut into the south-eastern face

Mweelrea rises 814m straight above Killary Harbour and is the highest mountain in Connacht, at the heart of a horseshoe massif that takes in Ben Lugmore and Ben Bury. Its south-eastern side is cut into cliff-lined corries, and the geology of the Mweelrea Formation is entirely different from the Twelve Bens across the fjord. It is a long, pathless, serious day, and the view down the length of Killary, Ireland's best known fjord, is the payment.

Mweelrea: The Highest Mountain in Connacht

Find the O'Malley tomb in Clare Island Abbey, thought to be Grace O'Malley's burial place, under its rare medieval roof paintings

Climb Knockmore, the island's highest point at 462 metres, for views across Clew Bay's scattered islands

Walk out to the old Clare Island Lighthouse on the north cliffs, dark since 1965 and now a private guesthouse

Find the O'Malley coat of arms carved in the abbey, with the family motto 'Terra Marique Potens' — powerful on land and sea

Grace O'Malley ran Clew Bay as a sea power in the 16th century and is thought to be buried on Clare Island, in the Cistercian abbey founded in the 12th or 13th century, which keeps rare medieval roof paintings. The O'Malley arms are carved in the same building with the family motto, Terra Marique Potens — powerful on land and sea, which in her case was accurate. Behind the abbey, Knockmore rises to 462 metres, high enough to show you the whole scatter of islands in the bay she controlled.

Grace O'Malley's Clare Island

Climb Benbaun at 729m, the highest of the Twelve Bens

Walk a ridge traverse between two or more of the Bens

Look east across the Inagh valley to the Maumturks, the range's partner

Work out which peaks you think the 'twelve' actually are — nobody agrees

The Twelve Bens — Na Beanna Beola, the peaks of Beola — are sharp quartzite summits west of the Inagh valley, four of them inside Connemara National Park and the rest on open mountain beyond it, and the odd thing about them is that nobody agrees which twelve they are: there are nearly twenty peaks with Ben or Binn in the name. Benbaun is the highest at 729m. The rock is bare, the ground between the peaks is bog, and there are almost no paths, which is why a traverse here is a serious undertaking and a superb one.

Benbaun and the Twelve Bens: Connemara's Quartzite Peaks

Walk Roundstone's harbour, laid out by Alexander Nimmo in the 1820s

Climb Errisbeg above the village for the view over the bog and the bays

Walk the tombolo between Gurteen Bay and Dog's Bay and look at what the sand is made of

Find the Franciscan monastery built in 1835

Roundstone was laid out in the 1820s by the Scottish engineer Alexander Nimmo, who was building roads and harbours all over the west of Ireland, and fishermen from Scotland settled in it; after Catholic Emancipation a Franciscan monastery went up in 1835. Behind the village rises Errisbeg, nearly 1,000 feet, with the bogs of Roundstone below. West of it, Gurteen Bay and Dog's Bay lie back to back on either side of a tombolo, and Robert Lloyd Praeger said their sand was made of the shells of foraminifera — an exaggeration, but it is made of fragments of shells and skeletons, not rock.

Roundstone: Nimmo's Harbour, Errisbeg and Dog's Bay

Take the ferry from Magheroarty and stay a night rather than day-tripping

See the work of the Tory school of naive painters on the island

Find the round tower, built in the 6th or 7th century

Walk out to the eastern spur and the pinnacles known as Balor's soldiers

Tory sits out in the Atlantic off the Donegal coast and has a king, chosen by the islanders' consensus rather than by any vote — the last of them, Patsy Dan Rodgers, was a painter who held the post from the 1990s until his death in 2018 and met every boat that landed. The island's school of naive painting grew up after the English artist Derek Hill began working here, and islanders paint the place themselves rather than leaving it to visitors. A round tower from the 6th or 7th century still stands, and out on the eastern spur are the rock pinnacles called Balor's soldiers, after the Fomorian king of the evil eye who is supposed to have lived here.

Tory Island: The King, the Painters and Balor's Rock

Take the guided tour and count the sixteen rooms inside a building that looks like it has one

Find the four hollow columns that drain the roof and the funerary urns that are chimneys

Find the panelled front door, of which only two panels actually open

See how the subtly curved window panes hide the partitions, so one window serves several rooms

From outside, the Casino looks like a small neoclassical garden temple with one room in it. Inside there are sixteen, on three floors, and the whole building is a sustained architectural joke: four of the columns are hollow with a chain hanging inside each to carry rainwater down, the Roman funerary urns on the roof are working chimneys, only two panels of the front door actually open, and the window panes are subtly curved to hide the partitions behind them. William Chambers designed it for the Earl of Charlemont, it was finished around 1775, and Chambers never saw it — he was too busy in England to ever visit.