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Coverage / Ireland

Ireland

Northern Europe

Where Ireland earns a visit: 13 activities across 13 curated destinations.

13 activities · 14 pairings · 24 verified providers

What you can do in Ireland

Culinary / Cooking

Shanagarryyear-roundShanagarry is the place that taught Ireland to cook with its own produce. Around Ballymaloe House, the Allen family built a way of cooking rooted in the farm at the door, and the cookery school that grew from it became the most influential in the country. You come here to learn hands-on, from a half-day class to a full twelve-week immersion, on a working organic farm where the vegetables, eggs, meat and dairy in front of you were grown or raised within sight of the kitchen. The teaching is practical and produce-led rather than showy, the setting is East Cork farmland a few minutes from the sea at Ballycotton, and the lineage runs directly back to the cooks who put Irish country food on the map. For anyone who wants to understand why Irish food changed, this is the source.

Film Festivals

Cork International Film FestivalCorkNovCork International Film Festival is the oldest film festival in Ireland, and it has kept a reputation for discovery rather than red carpets. Founded in 1956, it takes over the cinemas and venues of Cork city for eleven days each November, screening international features, Irish premieres and documentaries alongside one of the most respected short-film programmes in Europe, an Oscar-qualifying strand that filmmakers target from around the world. The scale suits the city: independent, walkable and serious about film without the crush of the biggest festivals, so audiences and visiting directors actually mix. Held in the dark of November, it turns Cork into a film town for a fortnight, with screenings, talks and events spread across a compact centre. For anyone who cares about cinema and wants a festival where the programme, not the celebrity, is the point, Cork is the Irish one to attend.

Horse Riding / Equestrian

ConnemaraApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctConnemara is horse country in the deepest sense: it is the birthplace of the Connemara pony, Ireland's only native breed, a hardy mountain-and-moor animal shaped by this exact landscape. Riding here means the two settings that make the west famous, long white-sand beaches where you can canter at the tide line with the Atlantic on one side and the Twelve Bens on the other, and open bog and hill tracks that run for miles without a fence. The riding centres are small, family places rooted in the area, some of them working pony studs where the horses under you were bred on the ground you are crossing. It suits complete beginners taking a led beach ride as much as experienced riders wanting hours in open country. Set against Connemara's changeable Atlantic light and empty scenery, a ride here is one of the simplest and best ways to get into the landscape that draws people to this corner of Ireland.

Mountaineering / Summits

MacGillycuddy's ReeksApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctThe MacGillycuddy's Reeks are Ireland at its most mountainous, and Carrauntoohil is the summit everyone wants. At 1,039 metres it is the highest point in the country, set in a tight range of sharp ridges, glacial corries and mountain lakes that feels far bigger than its modest height suggests. The classic ascent by the Devil's Ladder is a steep, loose scramble, while the Coomloughra Horseshoe links the three highest peaks in Ireland on one exposed ridge walk, and Brother O'Shea's Gully offers a scenic middle line. This is proper mountain terrain: the weather changes fast, cloud swallows the tops, and the ground is rough and unforgiving, so most people go with a guide who knows the routes and the escapes. Reach the summit cross on a clear day and the reward is a view over the lakes of Killarney, the Ring of Kerry and out to the Atlantic. For a summit day in Ireland, this is the one.

Museums & Galleries

Dublinyear-roundDublin holds Ireland's national collections in a centre small enough to cross on foot, and much of it is free. The National Museum on Kildare Street is the single best place to understand the country's deep past, from Iron Age bodies preserved in bogs to the gold and metalwork of early Christian Ireland. A short walk or tram away, EPIC tells the other half of the Irish story, the ten million who left, through a modern interactive museum in the old docklands vaults. Around them sit the National Gallery, the writers and revolutionaries of Kilmainham Gaol, and the illuminated Book of Kells at Trinity College, so a museum day here can move from prehistoric gold to the 1916 Rising to the global diaspora within a couple of hours' walking. For a capital its size, the concentration and quality of what is on show is unusual, and the national institutions carry no admission charge.

Music & Culture Festivals

Electric PicnicStradballyAugElectric Picnic is Ireland's biggest festival, and it takes over the parkland of a private Georgian estate for one weekend at the end of every summer. First held at Stradbally Hall in 2004 as a boutique event, it grew into a three-day gathering of around eighty thousand people a day, spread across dozens of stages that run well beyond the headline music into comedy, theatre, cabaret, spoken word, food and late-night electronic arenas. It has become the social event of the Irish summer, the festival everyone talks about, with a lineup that mixes global headliners with the depth of the Irish music scene. The setting matters: mature woodland, walled gardens and the hall's demesne give it a character closer to a temporary town than a field. For anyone who wants to understand contemporary Irish culture in one place, a weekend at Stradbally is the shortcut.

Music at the Source

Doolinyear-roundDoolin is where you go to hear Irish traditional music at its source. From the 1950s a small group of local players, above all the Russell brothers Micho, Packie and Gussie, drew musicians and collectors to the village, and its pubs became a mecca for the music long before it was a tourist draw. Today three or four pubs within walking distance run live sessions almost every night of the year, and on a good night you can move between them and hear fiddle, concertina, flute, whistle and bodhran played by locals and visiting players sitting in together. Beyond the pub sessions you can go deeper, sitting in a musician's own home for an evening built around the tunes and the stories behind them. It is unpolished and participatory rather than staged, and it sits on the Clare coast between the Burren's limestone and the Cliffs of Moher, so the music comes wrapped in some of Ireland's best landscape.

Sailing

Cork HarbourApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctCork Harbour is where organised yachting began, and it is still the best place in Ireland to learn to sail. The Royal Cork Yacht Club at Crosshaven traces its foundation to 1720 and is generally accepted as the oldest yacht club in the world, which means three centuries of racing and teaching are built into the water here. The harbour itself is a huge sheltered basin with reliable summer breezes, a forgiving place to take a first dinghy course, and an open door to the south coast beyond for those building sea miles toward a skipper's ticket. In racing years it hosts Cork Week, one of Europe's major regattas, filling the harbour with fleets. You can learn on a dinghy, train up through the cruising courses, or crew a keelboat, all within a short drive of Cork city, in a place where the sport has genuine roots rather than a bolted-on holiday programme.

Surfing

Trekking / Hiking

GlendaloughApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctGlendalough packs a great deal of Ireland into one glaciated valley an hour from Dublin. At the valley floor sit the ruins of a monastic city founded in the sixth century by St Kevin, its round tower and churches strung along the river, and above them a network of waymarked trails climbs through oak forest to the two lakes, the old Miners' Village and the ridge known as the Spinc. From the tops you look down the length of the valley to the lakes, with the boglands of Wicklow rolling away beyond. It is also the honeypot access point for the Wicklow Way, the long-distance trail that runs the spine of the mountains, so a day here can be a gentle lakeside loop or a lung-stretching climb, and a base for longer walking. The combination of accessible mountains, ancient ruins and proximity to the capital is why this is the walk most visitors to Dublin should make time for.

Wildlife Safaris

BaltimoreAug Sep Oct NovThe waters off West Cork are the best in Ireland for watching large whales from a boat, and Baltimore is the village they leave from. From late summer into autumn, fin whales, the second-largest animal on earth, and humpback whales move inshore to feed on shoals of sprat and herring in and around Roaringwater Bay, sometimes lunging and breaching within sight of the coast. Earlier in the season minke whales, common dolphins, harbour porpoise and basking sharks are the regulars. Trips run out past Sherkin and Cape Clear toward the iconic Fastnet Rock lighthouse, so the seascape is a draw even between sightings. The operators here are small, owner-run and conservation-minded, run by skippers and marine naturalists who know where the animals feed, which is why this stretch of coast has become the reference point for Irish whale watching. For a real chance at big whales in European waters, this is the place.

Wine / Spirits Education

Dublinyear-roundDublin was once one of the whiskey capitals of the world, and it has spent the last decade getting it back. In the nineteenth century the distilleries of the Liberties made the city's name synonymous with pot-still whiskey, before trade wars, prohibition and consolidation all but wiped Dublin distilling out by the mid twentieth century. The revival is now visible on the ground: a working distillery has returned to Newmarket, and the historic Jameson site in Smithfield tells the older story where the whiskey was actually made. You can spend a day moving between them, learning how Irish pot-still whiskey is triple-distilled and matured, tasting across styles, and understanding why Irish and Scotch diverged. It is whiskey education in the city that shaped the spirit, walkable between sites and wrapped in the pubs and history of the Liberties and Smithfield.

Witness / Attend

St Patrick's FestivalDublinMarSt Patrick's Festival is the source event of a day now celebrated all over the world, held where it means the most. Every March, Dublin turns its national day into a multi-day festival that fills the Georgian centre with music, theatre, street spectacle and light shows, building to the National St Patrick's Day Parade on 17 March. The parade runs a city-centre route past the old parliament and Trinity College and draws around half a million people, a mix of Dubliners, returning diaspora and visitors from everywhere. Unlike the green-beer version exported abroad, the Dublin festival leans into Irish arts, language and community, with pageant companies, marching bands and community groups from across the country. Coming for the real thing means seeing where the tradition sits in its own city, close to the museums, pubs and history that give the day its weight.

Best months at a glance

	J	F	M	A	M	J	J	A	S	O	N	D
Culinary
Film Festivals
Horse Riding
Mountaineering
Museums
Music Festivals
Music at the Source
Sailing
Surfing
Trekking
Wildlife Safaris
Wine & Spirits
Witness / Attend

Upcoming events in Ireland