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

Carrowkeel

Six nights across Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon, from the passage tombs of Carrowmore and Carrowkeel to the royal complex at Rathcroghan, with Boyle Abbey and a coal mine on the way.

The Passage Tombs of the West: Carrowmore, Carrowkeel and Rathcroghan

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

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

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

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

Tour Parke's Castle on the shore of Lough Gill and find the footprint of the O'Rourke tower house inside it

Walk to Creevelea Abbey on the west bank of the Bonet

Find the carvings in the Creevelea cloister

Work out what it means that one site is Gaelic and the other is the plantation that replaced it

Brian O'Rourke, the last Gaelic lord of West Bréifne to hold this ground, was executed by the English crown and his tower house confiscated. Captain Robert Parke leased the site in the 1630s and built a plantation manor house inside the old bawn — so what stands on Lough Gill today is an English house wrapped around the footprint of the Gaelic castle it replaced. West of the village on the Bonet stands Creevelea, founded in 1508 by Eóghan O'Rourke and his wife Margaret O'Brian, daughter of a King of Thomond: the last Franciscan friary built in Ireland before the Dissolution.

Dromahair: Parke's Castle and the Last Franciscan Abbey

Take a boat out onto Lough Gill and find Innisfree, the tiny uninhabited island that gave Yeats' 1888 poem its title

Note the local claim that Church Island, not Innisfree itself, better matches the poem's description — Innisfree is really too small to live on

Explore the Yeats exhibition at Sligo County Museum

Walk Sligo town's streets that Yeats knew as a boy, now home to the Yeats Building and Society

Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1888 while homesick in London, and the island is really out there on Lough Gill — though locals will tell you Church Island fits the poem better, because Innisfree itself is far too small to build a cabin on. That argument is part of the pleasure of taking a boat out. Sligo town, where he spent his boyhood summers, now holds the Yeats Building and the Yeats Society, and the county museum keeps the exhibition devoted to him.

Yeats Country: Innisfree and Lough Gill

Stand on the most northerly point of mainland Ireland

Climb Altnadarrow to the watchtower of 1805

Find the 80 EIRE sign laid out in stones below the tower and work out who it was for

Find out why Malin Head is read out in the BBC Shipping Forecast

Malin Head, in the townland of Ardmalin at the tip of the Inishowen peninsula, is the most northerly point of mainland Ireland. On Altnadarrow, the Tower Hill, stands a watchtower built in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars, and around 1902 the Marconi Company built a signal station close to it. North of the tower, stones laid on the ground spell out 80 EIRE, a marker from the Second World War telling aircraft overhead that they were crossing neutral Irish territory. Weather reports have gone out from Malin Head since 1885, and its station is one of the 22 read out in the BBC Shipping Forecast. Scenes from Star Wars: The Last Jedi were filmed here.

Malin Head: The Top of Ireland

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.