Go through the Hunt collection room by room in the Georgian Custom House

Find the Picasso and the Jack B. Yeats among the medieval and ancient pieces

Look at how the collection is displayed as a house rather than a gallery

Walk the Shannon quays outside the Custom House afterwards

John and Gertrude Hunt spent a lifetime collecting and gave the whole thing to the Irish people. It started at the University of Limerick and moved in 1997 into the city's Georgian Custom House, and what is in there is extraordinary for a provincial museum — works by Picasso and Jack B. Yeats alongside medieval and ancient material, laid out in a house rather than a gallery so you come on things in ordinary rooms.

The Hunt Museum: One Family's Collection in the Custom House

See Leamy House on Hartstonge Street, the school McCourt attended — the museum that was in it closed in 2019 and its collection is now at the People's Museum

Walk the Angela's Ashes trail through the streets of the old lanes district

Find where the McCourt family lived, and see what stands there now that the lanes have been cleared

Go into St Joseph's Church, where McCourt was turned away when he went to be taken on as an altar boy

Read a passage of Angela's Ashes standing in the part of the city it describes

Frank McCourt's parents met in New York and came back to Limerick when the work ran out, sinking into the lanes with the alcoholism that shaped the whole book. His father left for the factories of wartime Coventry when Frank was eleven and rarely sent money home. Angela's Ashes came out in 1996 and took the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography the following year, for a memoir of exactly that — misery, squalor, and a comic timing that makes it readable. The city it describes has largely been cleared, which is part of what you are looking at: the lanes are gone, and the walk is about what replaced them.

Angela's Ashes: Frank McCourt's Limerick

Climb through Bunratty Castle to the Great Hall and the rooms above it

Find out how the O'Briens came to hold Bunratty around 1500

Walk the village street and farmhouses of the Folk Park

Book the medieval banquet held in the castle in the evening

The castle at Bunratty is the fourth on the site; the present building was begun in the 15th century, and around 1500 it passed to the O'Briens, the most powerful clan in Munster and later Earls of Thomond. It was bought and restored in the 1950s by the 7th Viscount Gort with the Office of Public Works and furnished with 15th- and 16th-century pieces. Since 1963 it has held medieval banquets in its hall at night, begun to give travellers from Shannon Airport something to do. Around it, Bunratty Folk Park recreates 19th-century rural Ireland, with farmhouses and a village street of shops, a pub and a school.

Bunratty: The Castle, the Banquet and the Folk Park

Walk the thatched main street of the village

See Desmond Castle on the north bank of the Maigue, first recorded in 1226

Find the remains of the Augustinian and Trinitarian foundations in the village

See the Franciscan friary ruins standing among the fairways — they are inside the Adare Manor golf course, not on open access

Adare is routinely called the prettiest village in Ireland, and the thatched cottages on the main street are the reason people say it — but the reason the village exists is the crossing of the Maigue. Desmond Castle stands on the north bank, first mentioned in 1226 and said to have begun as an O'Donovan ring-fort, and the village holds the remains of Augustinian, Trinitarian and Franciscan foundations, an unusual concentration for a place this size.

Adare: Thatch, a Desmond Castle and Three Friaries

Stand inside the Grange stone circle, the largest in Ireland

Walk the lake shore under Knockadoon Hill where people have lived for six thousand years

Find Rannach Chruim Duibh, the 40-tonne stone in the circle, and the smaller second circle nearby

Come at the summer solstice, when the sunrise aligns on the circle's entrance

Lough Gur is a horseshoe of water at the foot of Knockadoon Hill, and people have lived around it continuously for something like six thousand years — it is one of the most important archaeological landscapes in Ireland. The Grange stone circle nearby is the largest in the country — Lios na Gráinsí, a ring of standing stones banked with earth, whose entrance is aligned on the rising sun at the summer solstice. Its biggest stone, Rannach Chruim Duibh, stands over 4 metres and weighs 40 tonnes. There are also wedge tombs, hut sites and a crannog around the lake.

Lough Gur: The Largest Stone Circle in Ireland

Hire a day boat from Killaloe Marina and take it out onto the southern end of Lough Derg

Walk up to St Flannan's Cathedral in Killaloe and find the Romanesque doorway and the ogham-and-runic stone inside

Cross the thirteen-arch bridge on foot between Killaloe in Clare and Ballina in Tipperary

Find where the Shannon once carried steamers and cargo boats between Killaloe and Limerick, before the railways took over

Killaloe and Ballina face each other across the Shannon at the southern end of Lough Derg, one in Clare and one in Tipperary, joined by a long stone bridge. Before the railways came this was a working river: steamers and cargo boats ran between Killaloe and Limerick, and the whole midlands moved its goods by water. Twenty-five kilometres up the western shore, off Mountshannon, is Holy Island — Inis Cealtra — with its round tower and monastic ruins, reached by boat from Mountshannon rather than from here.

Killaloe-Ballina Twin Towns River Crossing

Walk the Franciscan friary cloister and find the carving of Francis of Assisi on a pillar

See the castle on its rock in the River Deel

From the bridge, pick out where the defenders blew up their own walls in 1580 rather than surrender them

Walk down the Deel towards the Shannon estuary

Askeaton stands on the Deel three kilometres above the Shannon estuary, and it was a Desmond stronghold — a castle dating from 1199 on a rock in the river, and a Franciscan friary of 1389 whose cloister arcade still stands, with a carving of Francis of Assisi on one of its pillars. In 1580, during the Desmond Rebellions and after Carrigafoyle fell, the defenders blew up the castle walls themselves rather than leave it to the English, and abandoned it.