Find the MacDermott Roe crypt in Kilronan Burial Ground where O'Carolan is buried

Walk the lake shore at Ballyfarnon where he spent his last years

Learn the name of one O'Carolan tune before you come, and listen for it in a session afterwards

Find out what the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792 was for, and why it had to happen then

Come to Keadue for the O'Carolan Harp Festival held there each summer

Turlough O'Carolan was blinded by smallpox at eighteen and apprenticed to a harper by the MacDermott Roe family, who employed his father in Roscommon. He spent the next fifty years riding from house to house from one end of Ireland to the other composing tunes for whoever put him up, and he is the last great figure of a tradition that was already ending — harpers in the old Irish manner were still alive in 1792, when ten of them were gathered at the Belfast Harp Festival so their music could be written down before it went. He died on 25 March 1738 and lies in the MacDermott Roe family crypt at Kilronan, near Ballyfarnon. His tunes are still played nightly by people with no idea whose they are.

O'Carolan's Grave: The Blind Harper of the Big Houses

Go underground on the tour, where many of the guides are former Arigna miners

Find the seam markings on the tunnel wall and picture shovelling coal out of a space you cannot sit up in

Find the miners' lamp rack at the surface and ask what a lamp left hanging at the end of a shift meant

Go through the photographs of the last working years and find someone named in them

On the slopes of Kilronan Mountain above Lough Allen, coal was worked in seams 16 to 20 inches wide — among the narrowest known anywhere — with the miners lying on their sides to shovel it out. Coal has been worked here since the 1700s, on a hillside where iron was smelted a century before that, and it kept going until 1990, when the good coal ran out; the power station it fed burned through the last of the stockpile and shut soon after. The Arigna Mining Experience, built at Ireland's last working coal mine, takes you into the main tunnel — four feet high when it was worked, and widened since — and many of its guides are men who worked the seams themselves.

Arigna: The Mine You Worked Lying Down

Walk the servants' tunnels under the site of Rockingham House — Nash's mansion of about 1810 burned in 1957 and came down in 1971, so you are walking under a house that is not there

Climb the Moylurg Tower, five storeys of concrete raised in 1973 on the footprint of the house, and pick out Castle Island and Trinity Island on the lake

Take the boat tour for McDermott's Castle and the 13th-century abbey ruins — neither island can be landed on, so the water is the only way to see them close

Walk the 300m tree canopy walk — timber and steel, rising 9m above the woodland floor, the first structure of its kind in Ireland when it opened; from the highest point look north across the lake toward the island cluster

Lough Key has two islands with centuries of history you can see but not set foot on: Castle Island held the Mac Diarmada kings of Moylurg for six centuries, and Trinity Island is where the Premonstratensian White Canons wrote the Annals of Lough Cé — and where a tomb is said to be that of a chieftain's daughter who died of a broken heart. The forest park around the lake is a destination in itself, built on the bones of a Palladian estate that burned in 1957 and left its tunnels, tower and walled garden behind.

The Islands of Lough Key: Una Bhán and the Annals

Walk up into the Bricklieve Hills to the Carrowkeel cairns

Find Cairn G and the roofbox above its entrance

Find out what Carrowkeel Ware is and why it is named after this place

Look down over Lough Arrow from the tombs

Drive round to the great cairn at Heapstown

Carrowkeel is a cluster of passage tombs high in the Bricklieve Hills — An Bricshliabh, the speckled hills — above Lough Arrow in south Sligo, built in the fourth millennium BC. R.A.S. Macalister excavated them in 1911 with Robert Lloyd Praeger and found cremated and unburnt human bones, animal bones, tools and a kind of rough pottery that has been called Carrowkeel Ware ever since. Like Newgrange, one of the tombs, Cairn G, has a roofbox above its entrance. At the north end of Lough Arrow is the giant outlying cairn at Heapstown.

Carrowkeel: The Tombs of the Speckled Hills

Walk the nave from east to west and find where the stone changes — Romanesque at the chancel end, Early Gothic at the west, sixty years of building in one glance

Find the modifications made by Elizabethan soldiers in 1592 when the abbey was requisitioned as a barracks — look for blocked arches, inserted floors and garrison adaptations made to medieval sacred spaces

Study the carved capitals in the nave arcade — Cistercian rule demanded plain stonework, but the local masons sometimes added faces and foliage anyway; find the ones that broke the rules

Walk or cycle the 3km to Lough Key — the Mac Diarmada kings built this abbey and ruled from Castle Island, and the distance between the two is the point

Founded in 1161 under the patronage of the Mac Diarmada kings of Moylurg, Boyle Abbey was one of the most powerful of Ireland's early Cistercian houses and is among the best preserved — and one of the few buildings where you can stand inside and read six decades of architectural change in a single glance along the nave.

Boyle Abbey: Where Romanesque Meets Gothic

Climb Sliabh an Iarainn to 585m above Lough Allen

Look down on the drumlin field the glaciers left in the lowlands

Find the iron workings the mountain is named for

Walk or drive the Lough Allen shore below the mountain

Sliabh an Iarainn means the iron mountain, and it is named for what was taken out of it — ore worked here for centuries, feeding the ironworks that gave this corner of Leitrim its industry. It rises 585 metres east of Lough Allen, part of the Cuilcagh range, and the ice that shaped it heaped the lowlands below into thousands of drumlins. In legend it is where the Tuatha Dé Danann first landed in Ireland.

Sliabh an Iarainn: The Iron Mountain Over Lough Allen

Hire a boat at Carrick-on-Shannon for two or three days — no licence needed, instruction included

Navigate north through Battlebridge towards Spencer Harbour on Lough Allen

Work your first lock with the lock keeper talking you through it

Moor overnight at a designated riverside mooring and cook aboard

Work the locks yourself on the return leg without assistance

Carrick-on-Shannon is the centre of inland boating in Ireland, and a hire boat needs no licence — you get an hour's instruction and then the river is yours. Heading north from the town takes you through Battlebridge and on towards Spencer Harbour on Lough Allen, with three or four locks to work on the way. The first one is done with the lock keeper talking you through it; by the last you are doing it yourself, which is the actual achievement here.

Carrick-on-Shannon: Learning to Work the Locks

Buy a hurley from a local maker and ask which tree it came out of

Measure the bas on the hurley you bought and check it against the 13cm limit in GAA Rule 4.5

Find out why only the butt of the ash, where the trunk meets the root, will do

Take the new hurley to a ball alley or a club pitch and try the grip and the strike

Ask what ash dieback has done to the supply, and find one of the bamboo hurleys made since 2020

A hurley is cut from the butt of an ash tree where the trunk meets the root, because that is the only part where the grain curves the right way into the flat blade — the bas. Get it wrong and it snaps the first time it meets a sliotar. They are still made by local craftsmen by hand, and still sold for a few tens of euro. GAA Rule 4.5 says the bas may be no more than 13cm at its widest; in practice the rule is ignored completely and most hurleys run 15 to 17cm. Semple Stadium in Thurles is where you go to see them used — the home of Munster hurling, 45,690 capacity, second only to Croke Park, and named for Tom Semple who captained the Thurles Blues.

The Hurley: Ash, Grain and a Rule Nobody Keeps

Go to 15 Henrietta Street, the restored Georgian house Na Píobairí Uilleann has worked from since 2007

Watch a piper work the bellows, the bag, the chanter and the regulators at once, and count how many limbs are busy

Find out why bellows-blown pipes hold their tuning when mouth-blown pipes do not

Sit in on a recital or a class — both run here and are open to the public

Find out how Breandán Breathnach, Seán Reid and Séamus Mac Mathúna called the pipers together at Bettystown in 1968, and listen to Séamus Ennis or Leo Rowsome afterwards

The uilleann pipes are not blown. They came up in the early 18th century alongside the bellows-driven Northumbrian smallpipes and the Scottish Lowland pipes, all of them quieter and sweeter than the mouth-blown sets before them — but no other bellows pipe carries the uilleann pipes' regulators. A small bellows is strapped round the waist and the right arm, and pumping it fills the bag clamped under the other elbow — so dry air reaches the reeds instead of wet breath, which keeps the instrument in tune and leaves the player free to sing. There is a two-octave chanter, drones, and regulators struck with the wrist to lay chords under the tune. It is the most complicated bagpipe ever built, and it nearly died out. In 1968 Breandán Breathnach wrote to about a hundred pipers at home and abroad and called them to a gathering at Bettystown; Na Píobairí Uilleann came out of that meeting and works from a restored Georgian house at 15 Henrietta Street.