Walk the sculpture park and find the first pieces, made on the bog in 2002

Cycle or walk the trails across the cutaway bog

Find out what the Mesolithic camp found at Boora says about the first people here

Walk down to the angling lakes and the nature reserve

Boora Bog was cut away for peat by Bord na Móna, and the lake that gave it its name was drained. What was left has been given back: a nature reserve kept by the Irish Wildlife Trust, angling lakes, and Sculpture in the Parklands, a 50-acre land and environmental sculpture park that began in 2002, when seven Irish and international artists spent three weeks making the first pieces out on the bog. Excavations here also found a temporary camp from the Mesolithic.

Lough Boora: Sculpture on a Cutaway Bog

Walk the boardwalk trail into Clara Bog, one of the best-preserved raised bogs left in Western Europe, its pools and hummocks fed by rain alone

Tour the Tullamore D.E.W. visitor centre in the old bonded warehouse and find out who Daniel Edmund Williams was

Find where the road split the bog into two domes, western and eastern

Find the flush pools where alkaline groundwater supports plant life found nowhere else on the bog

Clara Bog is one of the best-preserved raised bogs left in western Europe — a dome of peat fed by nothing but rain, with its own pattern of pools and hummocks, crossed by a boardwalk so you can see it without damaging it. Around the edges, flush pools fed by alkaline groundwater support plants found nowhere else on the bog. The reserve covers some 460 hectares, and a road cut across the bog long ago left it with two domes, a western and an eastern. Ten minutes away in Tullamore, the whiskey goes back to the distillery founded in 1829 and carries the initials of Daniel Edmund Williams, its general manager and later owner; the new distillery opened in 2014.

Clara Bog and Tullamore D.E.W.

See Francis Johnston's Gothic Revival front from the demesne — public tours are suspended at present

Find out what a vaulted gallery was for in a house that was never meant to be defended

Walk the ancient oak woodland in the demesne around the castle

Ask about the ghost stories — the castle has never tried to play them down

Charles William Bury commissioned Charleville in 1798 and Francis Johnston built it between 1800 and 1812, on the edge of Tullamore beside the River Clodiagh. It is Gothic Revival taken entirely seriously — turrets, battlements and a great vaulted gallery, all of it built as a house rather than a fortification, at a moment when the country around it had just come through rebellion. The demesne oaks are old enough to have been standing well before the castle was thought of.

Charleville Castle: Francis Johnston's Gothic Fantasy

Walk the harbour and the lock where the canal drops into the Shannon

Find the ruins of the canal hotel that housed passengers overnight

Walk the Grand Canal towpath east from the harbour across the bog

Have a pint in one of the two pubs and watch the boats work the lock

Shannon Harbour is where the Grand Canal finally reaches the Shannon after crossing the bogs from Dublin, and for a century it was one of the busiest inland ports in Ireland — passengers and freight transferring between canal boats and river steamers, with a hotel to hold them overnight. The traffic went and the village stayed: a handful of houses, a lock, docking for boats, and two pubs. It is one of the quietest places on the whole waterway, and the junction survives largely as it was build canal junction in the country.

Shannon Harbour: Where the Grand Canal Meets the River

Walk a length of esker ridge and feel the dry gravel road above the bog on either side

Find Durrow Abbey, one of the monasteries the Slighe Mhór linked

Find out how a ridge of glacial gravel became the main road across Ireland

Work out where the line between Leath Cuinn and Leath Mogha ran

When the ice sheets melted about ten thousand years ago, rivers running underneath them left behind long winding ridges of sand and gravel — eskers. The Esker Riada is the chain of them running across the middle of Ireland, and because it was the only dry ground across the central bogs it became the great east–west road, the Slighe Mhór. It is also a legendary political line: tradition has it that after a battle at Mag Lena the island was divided along it into Leath Cuinn, Conn's half, in the north, and Leath Mogha, Mogh's half, in the south. The road it carried, the Slighe Mhór, linked the monasteries of Clonard, Durrow and Clonmacnoise, and the N6 from Dublin to Galway still follows the line.

The Esker Riada: The Gravel Road That Divided Ireland

Walk out to Cromwell's Castle, Cromwellian in origin from 1653 and rebuilt as a gun position in the Napoleonic wars, still standing over the Shannon crossing

Find the Salt Battery — Fort Eliza — with its emplacements for four cannons, and the Martello tower

Walk the harbour and the marina on the Shannon

Find Charlotte's Way, the house once called Hill House, where Charlotte Brontë's widower lived out his life, and the house Trollope lodged in

Banagher sits on one of the very few crossings of the mid-Shannon, and it is fortified out of all proportion to its size. Cromwell's Castle, built in 1653, still stands controlling the river; so do the Salt Battery — Fort Eliza — with emplacements for four cannons, Fort Falkland, and a 19th-century Martello tower, all of them put there to hold one bridge. Anthony Trollope lived here in the 1840s, and Arthur Bell Nicholls came back to Banagher after the death of his wife Charlotte Brontë and lived at Hill House until 1906.

Banagher: The Shannon Crossing and Cromwell's Bridgehead

Stand under the restored Leviathan, the largest telescope on Earth in 1845

Find Mary Rosse's darkroom in the science museum

Cross the wrought-iron bridge of 1820, said to be the oldest in Ireland

Walk the walled gardens and find the 300-year-old box hedges

The 3rd Earl of Rosse built the great telescope at Birr, and when it was finished in 1845 it was the largest on Earth, able to see further into space than any before it. His son, the 4th Earl, measured the heat of the moon. After 1908 the telescope fell into disrepair, the mirror went to the Science Museum in London and the iron frame was melted down around 1914 for the war; it was restored in the late 1990s, and you can stand under it again. The castle is still the Earl's home, but the demesne is open: a science museum with Mary, Countess of Rosse's darkroom, thought to be the oldest surviving in the world, a wrought-iron bridge of 1820, said to be the oldest in Ireland, and box hedges more than 300 years old in the walled gardens.

Birr Castle: The Leviathan of Parsonstown

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

Find the portcullis still hanging at the gate

Ask the guide to point out what Essex's guns did to the walls in 1599

Climb the keep and look down on the Suir on both sides of the island

Find out how Essex took the castle in three days in 1599

Cahir Castle, one of the largest castles in Ireland, stands on a rocky island in the river Suir. Conchobar Ua Briain, King of Thomond, began it in 1142, and in 1375 it was granted to the Butlers, who enlarged it over the next three centuries. In 1599 the Earl of Essex brought Elizabeth's army and cannon against it and took it after a three-day siege; the damage his artillery did can still be read in the stone. The original portcullis still hangs at the gate. It came to the state after 1961 and was opened by the Office of Public Works in 1971.