A country · 607 places · 10 regions
Ireland, all of it.
607 curated places across 10 regions — photographed, mapped, and noted with the season each is best in.
The 4 biggest regions — Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster — read below as chapters, with 6 more waiting past them.
Chapter I · Leinster · 185 places
Leinster
Glendalough is a glacial valley in the eastern Wicklow Mountains, about fifty kilometres south of Dublin, holding two lakes strung along its floor between steep sides of granite and mica-schist. The Upper Lake sits in the head of the valley beneath the cliffs of Lugduff and the Spinc; the Lower Lake, smaller and shallower, lies below it, and the monastic ruins stand on the drier ground between the lake outflow and the village of Laragh. The name means the valley of the two lakes. The whole thing was cut by ice, which is why the sides are so straight and the floor so flat, and the Poulanass stream drops into it in a series of falls on the southern flank. The story behind it. St Kevin withdrew here in the sixth century, reputedly living first in a cave above the Upper Lake still called St Kevin's Bed, and the community that grew around him became one of the major monastic centres of early medieval Ireland, with pilgrim roads running in from every direction. What survives is exceptional. The round tower stands about thirty metres high, its conical cap rebuilt in 1876 using the original stones found inside; the gateway at the entrance to the monastic city is the only surviving example of a monastic gatehouse in Ireland, with an antae and a cross-inscribed slab that marked the boundary of sanctuary. The cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul is the largest ruin; St Kevin's Church, its stone roof and little belfry giving it the nickname of St Kevin's Kitchen, is the most complete. Reefert Church stands among trees near the Upper Lake, and Temple-na-Skellig can only be seen from the water. Vikings raided repeatedly, English forces burned the settlement in 1398, and the diocese was absorbed into Dublin in 1214, but pilgrimage continued into the nineteenth century. On screen. Glendalough sits in the middle of Ireland's busiest film county without being a set itself, and the distinction is worth being precise about. John Boorman, who lived a few miles down the valley at Annamoe, shot Excalibur (1981) almost entirely in Wicklow: Arthur draws the sword from the stone at Childers Wood near Roundwood, ten minutes north of here, and Lancelot's duel was filmed at the waterfall on the Powerscourt estate. Braveheart (1995) worked the high ground to the west, building an English stockade at the Coronation Plantation near the Sally Gap and staging Wallace's escape at the Blessington Lakes. Vikings (2013–2020) was made entirely in Ireland from Ashford Studios, twenty minutes east, with longship sequences filmed on the water at Luggala and Poulaphouca. P.S. I Love You (2007) shot its Irish half in County Wicklow. Glendalough itself appears chiefly as itself — in documentary, in tourism film and in a long line of Irish television — and the valley's real contribution to all of the above is the crew base, the landscape and the road network that made Wicklow a production centre in the first place. What you actually see today. Two car parks serve the valley: the free one by the visitor centre at the monastic city, and a paid one at the Upper Lake. From the Upper Lake the marked routes climb quickly. The White Route, usually called the Spinc, runs up more than six hundred railway-sleeper steps beside the Poulanass waterfall to a boardwalk along the cliff edge with the lake directly below, then loops back past the ruins of the Miners' Village at the head of the valley, where lead and zinc were worked from the early nineteenth century until the 1950s. It is about eleven kilometres and takes four hours. Shorter green and blue routes circle the lakes on the flat. Sika deer, introduced to Wicklow in the nineteenth century, are common at dusk, and the valley sides carry oak woodland that is among the best remaining in the east of Ireland. Getting there and timing. Glendalough is about an hour and a quarter from central Dublin by the N11 and R755, or by daily coach from the city centre. It is one of the most visited places in Ireland and summer weekends fill both car parks by mid-morning. The monastic city, the visitor centre and the path along the Lower Lake are level and surfaced; everything above the Upper Lake car park involves steps and rough ground. Early autumn gives the best combination — colour on the oak, water in the falls, and space on the boardwalk.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter II · Munster · 156 places
Munster
The Cliffs of Moher run for about fourteen kilometres along the Atlantic edge of County Clare, from Hag's Head in the south to the townland of Fisherstreet near Doolin in the north. The wall of rock reaches its greatest height, roughly 214 metres, at Knockardakin just north of O'Brien's Tower; at Hag's Head it drops to about 120 metres. The stone is Namurian shale, siltstone and sandstone laid down around 320 million years ago in the delta of a vast river system, which is why the face reads as a stack of horizontal bands rather than a single block. Below the tower stands Branaunmore, a sixty-seven-metre sea stack that was once part of the cliff line and is now cut off by the swell. The story behind it. The name comes from a vanished promontory fort, Mothar, that stood near Hag's Head and was demolished during the Napoleonic wars to make room for a signal tower whose stump still marks the southern viewpoint. The round tower on the high ground was built in 1835 by Sir Cornelius O'Brien, a local landlord and member of parliament with a talent for self-promotion, explicitly as a viewing platform for visitors — tourism here is nearly two centuries old. The modern Cliffs of Moher Visitor Experience opened in February 2007, dug into the hillside behind the path with a grassed roof so that nothing new breaks the skyline. The cliffs and the karst country behind them together form the Burren and Cliffs of Moher UNESCO Global Geopark, and the site now draws well over a million and a half people a year, making it one of the busiest attractions in Ireland. On screen. Two productions fixed these cliffs in the popular imagination. In Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987) they play the Cliffs of Insanity, up which Vizzini's party scrambles with the Man in Black behind them: the towering cliff face seen from the water is Moher, filmed by a small unit from the sea, while the rope-climbing itself was staged on a set in England — the principal cast never stood on the Clare coast. Two decades later, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) used the cliffs for the black rock and heaving sea where Dumbledore and Harry apparate before entering the Horcrux cave; it was the only sequence in that film shot outside the United Kingdom, and the cave itself is a construction, not a real opening in the rock. The cliffs have also carried a long line of music videos, including Westlife's My Love and Maroon 5's Runaway, both of which lean on the same trick: a lone figure, a lot of grey Atlantic, and a horizon with nothing in it. What you actually see today. From the visitor centre a flagged path runs north and south behind a low wall, with the tower about ten minutes' walk uphill. On a clear day the Aran Islands sit low on the water to the northwest and the Twelve Bens of Connemara rise beyond them; Loop Head closes the view to the south. Between May and July the ledges are crowded with breeding seabirds — guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and fulmars in tens of thousands, with the puffin colony concentrated on the grassy top of Goat Island just north of the tower, best watched with binoculars in the early morning. Ravens and choughs work the updraughts, and peregrines nest on the face. Beneath the cliffs at Aill na Searrach lies Aileen's, a heavy-water reef that has been surfed by tow-in crews since the mid-2000s and produces some of the largest ridable waves in Europe. Beyond the fence. The Cliff Coastal Walk links Doolin to Hag's Head over roughly twenty kilometres of clifftop, following an older right of way maintained by local landowners; walking it from Doolin southward puts the sun behind you in the afternoon and gives the classic view back along the whole cliff line. The path is unfenced for much of its length, close to a crumbling edge, and it is not a route for wind, wet rock or children on a lead. A calmer alternative is the Doolin ferry, which runs cruises along the base of the cliffs from March to October and shows the scale of the thing far better than the top does. Getting there and timing. The cliffs are about 70 kilometres from Galway and 75 from Limerick on the R478; parking is included in the timed admission ticket, which is cheaper when reserved online in advance. Coaches dominate between 11am and 4pm from Easter to September, so early morning and the last two hours of daylight are far quieter and the light is better, striking the north-facing wall side-on. The paths near the centre are level and surfaced and usable with a wheelchair, but the ground rises steeply towards O'Brien's Tower and the coastal walk beyond is rough. In strong westerlies the outer viewing platforms are closed, and rightly so.
✦ April to October · $$
Chapter III · Connacht · 84 places
Connacht
Connemara is a rugged coastal and upland district in the west of County Galway, characterised by extensive blanket bog, a deeply indented Atlantic coastline, and the Twelve Bens mountain range at its centre. The landscape shifts constantly between purple heather, brown moorland, and dozens of lakes catching the light of western skies. The area retains one of the strongest surviving Irish-speaking communities in the country, with Clifden serving as its main town.
via Wikimedia CommonsChapter IV · Ulster · 7 places
Ulster
Glenveagh National Park covers nearly 16,000 hectares of the Derryveagh Mountains in northwest Donegal and contains one of the largest expanses of intact Atlantic blanket bog in Ireland. The park's central valley is occupied by the long Lough Veagh and Glenveagh Castle, a nineteenth-century Scottish baronial-style shooting lodge with extensive planted gardens. Golden eagle reintroduction efforts in the park from the early 2000s have produced a small breeding population.
✦ April to October · $$
Regions of Ireland
Every place in Ireland
