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

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

Cobh and Midleton

Rosslare

Twelve nights in a loop from Rosslare to Kerry and back: Cork Harbour and Kinsale, three nights in West Cork around Baltimore, Garnish Island and the Healy Pass, Killarney, then Cashel and Kilkenny.

South to Cork and Kerry from Rosslare

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

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

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

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

Walk to Fermoy weir and watch for salmon on the Blackwater

Walk the north bank riverside path and find the former barracks complex

Find out what happened in Fermoy on 7 September 1919

Find out how John Anderson built a town here after 1791

Fermoy takes its name, Mainistir Fhear Maí, the monastery of the men of the plain, from a 13th-century Cistercian abbey. The town itself was built after 1791, when a Scotsman, John Anderson, bought the lands, and it grew around a large British Army barracks. On 7 September 1919 the IRA, led by Liam Lynch, attacked a party of British soldiers on their way to a Wesleyan church parade in the town. The Blackwater runs through the middle of it, and the weir is a place to watch salmon.

Fermoy: The Blackwater and the Garrison Town

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

Take the boat out to Garnish Island and walk Harold Peto's gardens

Climb to the Martello tower on the island

Walk the old oak and birch woods of Glengarriff Forest

Find out why the house Peto designed for the island was never built

Ilnacullin, Garnish Island, in Glengarriff harbour, was bought from the War Office in 1910 by John Annan Bryce, a Belfast man, and Harold Peto designed its gardens; the mansion Peto drew for it was never built. Bryce's son Roland left the island to the Irish nation in 1953. George Bernard Shaw stayed, and there is a restored Martello tower from the Napoleonic Wars — straight-sided, like the others in Cork, rather than splayed at the base. Behind the village, Glengarriff Forest keeps some of the oldest and most extensive oak and birch woods left in Ireland.