Walk across the Whitworth Aqueduct where the Royal Canal crosses the River Inny

Find the Cistercian abbey ruins on the banks of the Inny

Walk the Royal Canal towpath east or west from the village

Work out how a canal is built to cross a river at all

Mainistir Shruthla — the monastery of the river. The Cistercians founded an abbey here on the banks of the Inny in 1150, from Mellifont, eight years after the order reached Ireland and the ruins are still on the river. Then in the early 19th century the Royal Canal arrived and had a problem: it had to cross the Inny. The answer was the Whitworth Aqueduct, carrying the canal over the river on stone arches, and the trade it brought kept the village going until the middle of the twentieth century.

Abbeyshrule: The Whitworth Aqueduct Over the Inny

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.

Ballymahon and the Inny: Goldsmith's Country

Walk the village laid out in the 1860s to Lady Fetherston's Swiss idea

Look at the estate detailing on the houses around the green

Find the early church site connected with St Mel, who was consecrated by Patrick and made bishop here

Climb Ardagh Mountain behind the village for the view over Longford

Most of Ardagh was laid out in the 1860s by the Fetherston baronets, to a design by Rawson Carroll reputedly based on Lady Fetherston's idea of what a Swiss village should look like — which is why a Longford village has the shape and the detailing that it does. It worked: Ardagh has won the Irish Tidy Towns Competition three times, in 1989, 1996 and 1998, and taken the Prix d'Honneur of the Entente Florale. St Mel was ordained bishop here, and Ardagh Mountain rises 200 metres behind it.

Ardagh: The Village Built to Look Swiss

Book a guided tour — the only way onto the hill — and find Ail na Míreann, the Stone of the Divisions, where the provinces were said to meet

Climb to the top and count how many counties you can pick out

Walk the ring barrows and enclosures across the hill

Come at Bealtaine for the fire festival held on the hill

Uisneach sits near the geographical centre of Ireland and in mythology it is the symbolic centre of the island — the place of assembly, associated with the druids and with the festival of Bealtaine, and said to be the burial place of the Tuatha Dé Danann. On the slope lies Ail na Míreann, the Stone of the Divisions, a vast glacial boulder said to mark where the borders of all the provinces met. It is nicknamed the Cat Stone because it is supposed to look like a sitting cat. On a clear day you can see a large part of the country from the top.

The Hill of Uisneach: The Stone of the Divisions

Read a chapter of Castle Rackrent in the town where it was written

Find out how the rector's son from Edgeworthstown became Louis XVI's confessor

Find out what Maria Edgeworth's letters to Scott and Ricardo were about

Edgeworthstown was named in the 19th century after the Anglo-Irish Edgeworths, whose estate Richard Lovell Edgeworth built here. His daughter Maria came to it as a child in 1773 and lived and wrote here until she died in 1849, helping run the estate; her first novel, Castle Rackrent, gave the voice to an Irish Catholic servant to tell the decline of a landed family of her own class. She corresponded with Walter Scott and David Ricardo. The family also produced the economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth and, from the rector's house, Henry Essex Edgeworth, who became the confessor of Louis XVI.

Edgeworthstown: Maria Edgeworth's Town

See the 18-metre preserved stretch of oak trackway in the humidified hall

Find out how dendrochronology dated the timbers to 148–147 BC, contemporary with the fall of Carthage

Walk the bog outside and picture the quicksand and ponds the road was built to cross

Work out why a road this wide was built here at all, in a place with nothing obvious at either end

In 1984 timbers pulled out of a Longford bog turned out to be much later than anyone had assumed — Iron Age, not Bronze Age. Dendrochronology dated the oak to late 148 or early 147 BC — the same years Rome was destroying Carthage — and what they had found was a corduroy road of split planks laid on raised rails, wide and solid enough for wheeled traffic, running at least a kilometre across what was then bog, quicksand and ponds. Locals had always called it the Danes' Road. An 18-metre stretch is preserved indoors in a humidified hall, because exposed to air the oak would simply crumble.

The Corlea Trackway: An Iron Age Road Through the Bog

Go into the rebuilt cathedral and look at the quality of the restoration work

Find where the fire of Christmas Day 2009 took hold

See the new altar consecrated in March 2014

Work out what it took a town this size to rebuild something at this cost

St Mel's was built between 1840 and 1856 and was reckoned one of the finest Catholic churches in Ireland — the landmark building of the midlands. In the early hours of Christmas Day 2009 it burned. The damage came to around €30 million and the shell stood open to the sky. It was rebuilt: the ruins were opened to the public in September 2011, a new altar was consecrated in March 2014, and the cathedral reopened on Christmas Eve 2014, five years to the week after it was lost.

St Mel's: The Cathedral That Burned on Christmas Day

Look out towards Inchcleraun and its early Christian church ruins

Walk the Shannon bank where the river enters the lough

Fish the lough — it is one of the best coarse fisheries on the Shannon

Lough Ree — Loch Rí, the king's lake — is the second of the three great lakes of the Shannon and the second largest after Lough Derg, and Lanesborough sits at the northern end of it where the river comes in. Out in the northern part of the lake lies Inchcleraun, with the remains of several ancient churches from a monastery founded in the early Christian era. The lough is wide enough to have its own weather and its own long-running monster stories.

Lanesborough and Lough Ree: The Second Lake of the Shannon

Take a boat out on the Erne from the town harbour

Walk Butler Street down to the Diamond and round the town's buildings

Work out why the isthmus made this the crossing point

Follow the Shannon–Erne Waterway south and see how far it would take you

Béal Tairbirt means the mouth of the isthmus — the narrow neck of land between the Erne system and the drumlin lakes, which is why a town grew here and why it is now one of the main boating harbours on the Shannon–Erne. The main street runs down to the Diamond with the town's buildings around it, and below that the river. Since the Shannon–Erne Waterway reopened in 1994 you can take a boat from here the whole way to Limerick.