Tour the house and walk the full 80 feet of the Pompeian Long Gallery

Find the print room, and the staircase with its Lafranchini plasterwork

Look out from the house along the axis towards the Conolly Folly

William Conolly was Speaker of the Irish House of Commons and reputedly the richest man in Ireland, and in 1722 he built Castletown to prove it — the first and largest Palladian house in the country. He died in 1729 and his widow Katherine went on entertaining lavishly there until her own death in 1752. The Long Gallery inside runs 80 feet and was decorated in the Pompeian manner in the 1770s in blue, red and gold, which is not a scheme anyone would dare now.

Castletown House: The Speaker's Palladian Statement

Celbridge and Castletown

Dublin

Four nights of Dublin as its writers used it: Joyce's Bloomsday route, Beckett's Foxrock and his bridge, Stoker's Clontarf, Wilde's Merrion Square, the pubs in between, then Castletown House in Celbridge.

Literary Dublin: Joyce, Beckett and the Pubs Between

Walk the ruined keep of about 1203 at the gates of Maynooth University

Find where Skeffington's siege guns breached the walls in March 1535

Stand at the castle gate where the garrison was executed after surrendering

Walk the university's South Campus and the Royal Canal through the town

Strongbow granted this ground to Maurice Fitzgerald in 1176 and the keep went up around 1203; Maynooth became the seat of the Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare, the most powerful family in Ireland. It ended in March 1535. Silken Thomas, son of the ninth earl, had rebelled, and William Skeffington brought the heavy modern siege guns of the English army against the walls. The castle fell after ten days and the garrison was executed in front of its own gate. The ruin stands at the entrance to Maynooth University.

Maynooth Castle: The Pardon of Maynooth

See the Phoenix Monument, the Corinthian column of 1747 topped by a phoenix, at the centre of Phoenix Park

Take a guided tour of Áras an Uachtaráin, the President's residence, the former Viceregal Lodge of the 1750s, from the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre, on Saturdays

See the Wellington Testimonial, the 62m obelisk of 1861, the largest in Europe

See the site of the Papal Cross, the 35m cross where Pope John Paul II said Mass in 1979 before over a million people

Look for the fallow deer herd, 400 to 450 animals, out on the open grass of the Fifteen Acres

Phoenix Park holds a lot more than grass. The Phoenix Monument, a Corinthian column of 1747 topped by the bird, stands at the centre of it. The Wellington Testimonial is a 62m obelisk, opened to the public in 1861 and the largest in Europe. Áras an Uachtaráin, the President's house, went up in the 1750s as a private house for Nathaniel Clements and was bought by the Crown in the 1780s to be the Viceregal Lodge and can be toured free on Saturdays from the visitor centre. The Papal Cross marks where John Paul II said Mass to over a million people in 1979. And the fallow deer — 400 to 450 of them, descended from the herd of the 1660s — graze right through the middle of it.

Phoenix Park: The Obelisk, the Áras and the Deer

Cycle the full Phoenix Park perimeter, roughly 11km around one of Europe's largest enclosed city parks

Run or cycle a lap of the Fifteen Acres, the park's vast open playing fields, historically used for military reviews

Find the Magazine Fort, begun in 1735 on the site of Phoenix Lodge, the house of 1611 demolished the year before to make room for it

Visit the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre and Ashtown Castle beside it, the oldest building in the park

Phoenix Park is one of the largest enclosed city parks in Europe — 707 hectares inside an 11km perimeter wall — which is why half of Dublin trains here. The Fifteen Acres in the middle is not fifteen acres at all but a huge open sweep of playing fields, used for military reviews for centuries before it was used for football. Fallow deer have grazed here since the 1660s, when the Duke of Ormond walled the land as a hunting park, and the 400 or so animals in the park today are descended from that herd.

The Fifteen Acres: Cycling the Phoenix Park

Take the guided tour of Kilmainham Gaol, opened in 1796 as the New Gaol

Stand in the prison yard where the leaders of the 1916 Rising were shot

Find out why the first republicans executed by the Free State in the Civil War were shot in the same yard

See the gaol chapel, the last part of the building to be restored, re-opened in 1971

Go east to the GPO on O'Connell Street, headquarters of the Rising, and its GPO Witness History centre

Kilmainham Gaol opened in 1796 as the New Gaol, built to replace a dungeon a few hundred metres away and officially called the County of Dublin Gaol. Nearly every generation of Irish rebellion passed through it: Robert Emmet and Anne Devlin in 1803, Parnell and most of his parliamentary colleagues in 1881–82, and in 1916 the leaders of the Easter Rising, who were shot in the prison yard. The first four republicans executed by the Free State during the Civil War were shot in the same yard. The gaol was decommissioned in 1924, left to rot and nearly demolished, until a volunteer society formed in 1958 and sixty volunteers began clearing it in May 1960; it opened to the public on 10 April 1966, and the chapel, the last piece, re-opened in 1971. The courthouse next door became its visitor centre in 2015. Three kilometres east, the GPO on O'Connell Street was the headquarters of the Rising, where Patrick Pearse read the Proclamation on 24 April 1916.

Kilmainham Gaol: The Yard Where 1916 Ended

Walk the African Savanna, the open ground where giraffes, zebras and oryx share a paddock, and find the rhinos next to it

Visit the Kaziranga Forest Trail at Dublin Zoo, the home of the Asian elephants

Watch the sea lions feed at Sea Lion Cove, at the zoo's scheduled feeding time

Visit the Family Farm at Dublin Zoo, the children's area with its farm animals, in a zoo opened in 1831

Decimus Burton designed Dublin Zoo in 1830 and it opened the following year, and it has spent the last thirty years rebuilding itself around space rather than cages across 28 hectares of Phoenix Park. The African Savanna is open ground where giraffes, zebras and oryx share one big paddock, with the white rhinos in their own enclosure next door. The Kaziranga Forest Trail was built for the Asian elephant herd and is the reason they breed here. Sea Lion Cove has scheduled feeds, and the Family Farm is the part small children refuse to leave.

Dublin Zoo: African Plains and the Asian Elephants

Climb the seven floors around the atrium shaped like a pint

Learn to pour your own pint properly, with the two-part pour and the settle

Drink the pint in the Gravity Bar with the city laid out below

Find the 9,000-year lease Arthur Guinness signed in 1759, at £45 a year

The Storehouse opened at St James's Gate on 2 December 2000 and has taken over twenty million people through it since. The building is the joke: seven floors wrapped around a glass atrium built in the shape of a pint of Guinness, so you are climbing up through the inside of the drink. The seventh floor is the Gravity Bar, with Dublin laid out on every side and the pint itself included in the price of most tickets. It is the most visited paid attraction in the country and it earns it.

The Guinness Storehouse: Seven Floors Inside a Pint

Walk the formal garden compartments and find the plants that should not survive this far north

Tour the house and find Castlereagh's rooms

Walk down to the shore of Strangford Lough through the estate

Find the Temple of the Winds on the high ground above the lough — it opens on summer Sundays only

Mount Stewart stands on the east shore of Strangford Lough, the Irish seat of the Stewarts, Marquesses of Londonderry — among them the 2nd Marquess, better known as Viscount Castlereagh, who was Britain's Foreign Secretary at the Congress of Vienna. The gardens are the reason to come: the mild Strangford microclimate lets things grow here that have no business surviving in Ireland, and the planting is laid out in a series of formal compartments running down to the lough.

Mount Stewart: Castlereagh's Garden on Strangford

Get out on a clear moonless night away from the village lights and let your eyes adapt for twenty minutes

Trace the Milky Way from horizon to horizon

Find one of the reserve's designated viewing points on the Skellig Ring

Learn why Gold Tier is the highest dark-sky grade there is, and what it takes to keep it

The Iveragh Peninsula between Kells and Caherdaniel holds Ireland's first International Dark Sky Reserve, and on 27 January 2014 the International Dark-Sky Association gave it Gold Tier — the first Gold Tier Reserve in the northern hemisphere and one of only four in the world. There is no town light bleeding in from anywhere, the Atlantic is on three sides, and on a clear moonless night the Milky Way is not a faint smudge but a structure you can trace from one horizon to the other.