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

Editor's note

Two nights at Greenlands Caravan and Camping Park in Rosses Point village, Co. Sligo, seven kilometres from the tombs, with the Rosses Point Coastal Walk from the gate. Carrowmore has thirty surviving megalithic tombs and another twenty-five destroyed since 1800, most of them satellites around Listoghil, the restored cairn on the high point of the plateau. To the west the landscape is dominated by Knocknarea, with Miosgán Médhbh on its summit, fifty-five metres across and ten metres high, the largest cairn in Ireland outside Brú na Bóinne; reaching it means a climb, and the view back takes in Carrowmore and Sligo Bay. At Cliffony, Creevykeel sits right beside the N15: an open oval court with burial chambers off the far end, free and unfenced.

Editor's note

One night at Lough Arrow Touring Park at Ballynary near Riverstown, Co. Sligo, six kilometres from the hills, with the Doon Point Loop of the Kilronan Castle looped walks nearby. Carrowkeel is a cluster of passage tombs high in the Bricklieve Hills — An Bricshliabh, the speckled hills — above Lough Arrow, built in the fourth millennium BC, and getting to them means a walk up. R.A.S. Macalister excavated them in 1911 with Robert Lloyd Praeger, finding cremated and unburnt human bones, animal bones, tools and the rough pottery known ever since as Carrowkeel Ware. Cairn G has a roofbox above its entrance, as Newgrange does. At the north end of Lough Arrow stands the giant outlying cairn at Heapstown.

Editor's note

One night inside Lough Key Forest & Activity Park at Boyle, Co. Roscommon, with the Bog Garden Trail on the doorstep. The park stands on a Palladian estate that burned in 1957 and was demolished in 1971, leaving underground servants' tunnels, a walled garden and the Moylurg Viewing Tower, 150ft of concrete raised in 1973 on the footprint of the house. From the top you can pick out Castle Island, held by the Mac Diarmada kings of Moylurg, and Trinity Island, where Cistercian monks wrote the Annals of Lough Cé; neither can be landed on, so the boat tour is the only close view. Three kilometres off, Boyle Abbey, founded by the same family in 1161, shifts from Romanesque to Early Gothic along the nave.

Editor's note

One night at Lough Allen Caravan & Camping at Corrachuill in Co. Leitrim, five kilometres from the mine, with the Battlebridge to Drumleague Lock loop nearby. On the slopes of Kilronan Mountain above Lough Allen, men worked coal seams sixteen to twenty inches thick, among the narrowest in the Western world, lying on their sides through eight-hour shifts. Families mined here from the 1600s until the last shift in 1990. The tour goes underground with a former Arigna miner as guide, which is the reason to come: the man explaining the seam markings on the tunnel wall cut coal from them. At the surface are the original miners' lamp rack and a photographic exhibition of the final working years.

Editor's note

The last night is at Lough Key Caravan & Camping Park in the Rockingham Demesne at Boyle, with the Bog Garden Trail again and about twenty-three kilometres to drive to the sites. Rathcroghan is the royal complex of Connacht: 240 archaeological sites across ordinary Roscommon farmland, the seat of the legendary queen Medb at its centre, the main mound still unexcavated. The visitor centre at Tulsk is the way in, and explains Oweynagat, the Cave of the Cats, a Bronze Age souterrain in a natural fissure that medieval Irish literature names as the dwelling of the Morrígan and an entrance to the Otherworld. The route finishes at Strokestown Park, a Palladian house of the 1730s where Denis Mahon's rent rolls and eviction notices survive as the Irish National Famine Museum.