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

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

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

Find the round tower in St Columba's churchyard, at the heart of the monastery that made the Book of Kells

Find the five high crosses: four in the churchyard, one of them only a base, and the Market Cross in the town

Call into the town's heritage and tourism centre in the old courthouse for the story of the manuscript

Walk the actual medieval street layout that still exists

Stop at Headfort Arms for proper pub lunch with locals

Explore the old market square and courthouse

The Book of Kells is in Dublin, but the monastery that produced it was here, and the town still carries the shape of it. The round tower stands in St Columba's churchyard, and five high crosses survive — four in St Columba's churchyard, one of them only a base, and the Market Cross in the town — and the medieval street plan is still legible in the layout of the modern streets. The heritage centre supplies the context that the manuscript itself, behind glass in a Trinity College display case, cannot.

Kells: The Round Tower and the High Crosses

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

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

Climb the Hill of Slane and pick out the Hill of Tara 16km to the south

Walk the ruins of the 16th-century friary and college on the summit

Climb the friary tower for the view over the Boyne valley

Work out why a story about a fire needed these two hills to be inter-visible

Muirchú, writing a heavily mythologised Life of Patrick in the seventh century, says that Patrick lit a Paschal fire on this hilltop in 433, in direct defiance of the High King Lóegaire, who had forbidden any fire while the festival fire burned on Tara. Historians think Muirchú moved a fire lit somewhere else to Slane for the sake of the story — and the reason the story works at all is that you can see Tara from here, sixteen kilometres away. The hilltop now carries a ruined 16th-century friary and college.

The Hill of Slane: The Fire That Was Not Allowed

Walk the full length of the roofless nave and stand under the crossing tower

Get lost in the hedge maze, one of only two full-size ones in Ireland

Find out why Strongbow's uncle founded a Cistercian house on this estuary

Walk down to the Barrow estuary below the abbey

Richard de Clare — Strongbow — instructed his uncle Hervé de Montmorency to found a Cistercian house in Wexford, and Dunbrody is the result: a very large roofless abbey church on the Barrow estuary, with a nave you can walk the full length of and a crossing tower still standing. The visitor centre opposite is run by the present Marquess of Donegall and has one of only two full-size hedge mazes in Ireland, which is an unusual thing to find across the road from a medieval abbey.

Dunbrody Abbey: A Cistercian Nave and a Hedge Maze

Walk the banks of the River Inny at Ballymahon

Read The Deserted Village in the countryside it is thought to describe

Drive down to where the Inny reaches Lough Ree

Find the Goldsmith associations around Pallas and Lissoy

Oliver Goldsmith grew up around Ballymahon on the River Inny, and local tradition, with a long line of guidebooks behind it, places The Deserted Village in this countryside — though the poem names no real village — the poem about a village emptied by enclosure and emigration, published in 1770 and still the poem people reach for on the subject of rural depopulation in these islands. The Inny runs down to Lough Ree a few miles west, and the country is very much as flat and quiet as the poem implies.