Eat in The Yeats Room at Ballymaloe House, where the menu changes with what came in that day

Walk the farm and gardens that supply the kitchen

Book a course or a demonstration at the Ballymaloe Cookery School at Shanagarry

Work out how a farmhouse dining room in east Cork ended up reshaping Irish cooking

The Allens bought Ballymaloe House and its farm in 1947, and in 1964 Myrtle Allen opened a restaurant in her own dining room — The Yeats Room, named for the Jack Yeats paintings hanging in it — cooking what the farm and the sea in front of it produced that day, on a menu that changed every evening. That was heresy at the time and is now orthodoxy everywhere. The cookery school her daughter-in-law Darina Allen went on to run has trained a large share of the chefs working in Ireland today. The whole modern Irish food movement traces back to this one house.

Ballymaloe: Where Modern Irish Cooking Started

Midleton and Ballymaloe

Four nights across Cork, from the English Market in the city to Midleton and Ballymaloe in the east, then west to Clonakilty black pudding and Toons Bridge buffalo mozzarella.

Cork: The Food County

Walk the 13km cliff path west from Ballycotton towards Ballytrasna

Take the boat out to Ballycotton Island and climb the lighthouse

Watch the fishing boats land at the pier and breakwater

Eat what came off the boats that morning in the village

Ballycotton is a working fishing village on the east Cork coast with a 13km cliff walk running west from it to Ballytrasna. Two kilometres offshore on its own island stands the lighthouse, commissioned in 1851, when the keeper and his family lived out there; by 1899 the keepers were housed in the town and rotated duty, the light was automated in 1991 and the last keepers were withdrawn on 28 March 1992. The tower is painted black, one of only a handful in the world, to tell it apart from the beacon on Capel Island.

Ballycotton: The Cliff Walk and the Island Light

Tour the Old Midleton Distillery, now the Jameson Experience

Find the 31,618-gallon pot still, the largest ever built

See the iron water wheel of 1852 still turning

Find out how three rival distillers became Irish Distillers in 1966

The Old Midleton Distillery began as a woollen mill in 1796, was bought by the government in 1803 during the Napoleonic Wars and turned into a barracks, and became a distillery in 1825. The Murphys installed a pot still of 31,618 gallons, so big it had to be assembled on site with the building put up around it, and it is still the largest pot still ever built. An iron water wheel of 1852 still turns there. The old distillery closed in 1975, when a new one was built beside it for Irish Distillers, the merger of Jameson, Powers and Cork Distilleries, and the old buildings are now the Jameson Experience.

Midleton: The Largest Pot Still Ever Built

Take the ferry from Cobh to Spike Island, the fortress island in Cork Harbour, once a 7th-century monastery and later a convict depot known as Ireland's Alcatraz

Tour the Fort Mitchel prison on Spike Island, the star fort whose cells held the convicts

Visit the Titanic Experience Cobh in the old White Star Line ticket office, from which 123 passengers boarded Titanic at Queenstown in April 1912

Go into St Colman's Cathedral in Cobh and hear its carillon, Ireland's only one, with 49 bells

Cycle Great Island, the island Cobh is on, on the road over the causeway to Fota Island and Fota House and Arboretum

Cork Harbour is one of the largest natural harbours in the world and the history is stacked up around it. Spike Island began as a 7th-century monastery and became a convict depot so notorious it got called Ireland's Alcatraz; you tour the cells of the star fort begun in 1790 and rebuilt far larger from 1804, renamed Fort Mitchel in 1938. Back in Cobh, the Titanic Experience occupies the actual White Star Line ticket office where 123 passengers boarded the ship at Queenstown in April 1912, and St Colman's above the town has Ireland's only carillon, 49 bells, the largest in these islands. The causeway takes you on to Fota.

Cobh, Spike Island and Great Island by Bike

Climb to the 30-metre round tower, one of the best preserved in Ireland

Read the carved arcade on the west wall of the cathedral

Find the 8th-century oratory said to be St Declan's burial place

Walk the Ardmore cliff loop round the head below the village

Tradition holds that Declan was working in this part of the Déisi in the early 5th century and Christianised the area before Patrick ever arrived — which would make Ardmore the oldest Christian settlement in Ireland. On the hill above the village stand a 12th-century round tower 30 metres high and in excellent condition, a cathedral of the 12th and 13th centuries with a remarkable arcaded west wall, and an 8th-century oratory beside it. The cliff walk runs out round the head below.

Ardmore: Where Christianity Arrived Before Patrick

Find Geraldine Creedon's bronze at Rory Gallagher Place — guitar-shaped on one side, with lyrics from Jinx cast into the other; unveiled at the Jazz Festival in 1997

Find the marker at 27 MacCurtain Street, where he lived above what was then the Modern Bar — the address on his Cavern Club membership card

Find the trail marker on Merchant's Quay where Crowley's Music Centre stood until 2013 — in August 1963 he paid £100 there for the 1961 Stratocaster

Have a drink in the Long Valley on Winthrop Street, open since 1842 and still run by the Moynihans, with the back bar much as it was

Visit the Rory Gallagher Music Library at Cork City Library and find the signed 50th-anniversary Stratocaster in its case

In August 1963, a 15-year-old from MacCurtain Street paid £100 for a second-hand 1961 Fender Stratocaster at Crowley's Music Centre on Merchant's Quay. That guitar — worn to bare wood from 30 years of constant playing — never left Rory Gallagher's hands. Cork City Council named a city-centre plaza after him in 1997 and in June 2025 formally launched the Stompin' Ground walking trail, with stops marking every address in his early life.

Rory Gallagher: The Stompin' Ground

Walk through from the 1862 Princes Street entrance to the Grand Parade

Find the cast-iron fountain at the centre of the market

Buy tripe and drisheen, the dish Cork still eats

Buy fish from the stalls that supply the city's restaurants

There has been a market on this site in the middle of Cork since 1788, when it opened as a meat shambles; the present buildings are mid-19th century, with the ornamental Princes Street entrance built in 1862, and it runs through to the Grand Parade round a cast-iron fountain. It was badly damaged by fire in 1980, rebuilt to an award-winning conservation design, and burned again, less badly, in 1986. It is still best known for its fish and its butchers, supplies many of the city's restaurants, and is where Cork buys tripe and drisheen. Queen Elizabeth II came in 2011 and was served by the fishmonger Pat O'Connell.

The English Market: Cork's Covered Market Since 1788

Book and complete the full three-day pilgrimage on Station Island

Go barefoot for the whole three days, as the pattern requires

Keep the twenty-four-hour vigil without sleep, from 10pm on the first day through to 10pm on the second

Eat the Lough Derg meal — black tea, dry toast, oatcakes and water — once a day

Walk the penitential beds, the stone circles on the island

St Patrick's Purgatory on Station Island has run to the same pattern for a thousand years, and it is not a retreat in any modern sense. The three-day pilgrimage can begin on any day from late May to 13 August. You go barefoot for the duration. You eat one Lough Derg meal a day — black tea or coffee, dry toast, oatcakes, water — and you keep a twenty-four-hour vigil without sleep on the first night. The penitential exercises are described in the old accounts as a test of both devotion and endurance, and that has not changed.

Lough Derg: Three Days Barefoot on Station Island

Work through all twenty themed galleries, from migration since 500 AD to the diaspora today

Find the galleries on criminal transportation and on Irish involvement in foreign conflicts

Trace one family name through the emigration records in the genealogy centre

Look at the vaults themselves, built as a bonded customs warehouse from 1820

EPIC opened in May 2016 in the vaults of the CHQ Building — a bonded customs warehouse begun in 1820 by John Rennie and completed by Thomas Telford — and tells the story of the Irish diaspora across twenty themed galleries, running from migration patterns since 500 AD through the Famine, transportation, missionary work and the effects of Irish involvement in other people's wars. It was voted Europe's Leading Tourist Attraction at the World Travel Awards three years running, in 2019, 2020 and 2021.