Loughside, mid-way up the western shore is Sketrick Castle. This large, four storey tower house guarded the causeway to Sketrick Island and was actively involved in warfare in the 16th century. The immediacy and need for the defence is vitally evident in this watery landscape....
Kerry has a clean beauty of bone about it denied to the other more fleshy counties of Ireland, for although this southwest corner was notably glaciated in the Ice Age it was not overcoated by Drift to the same extent. Clear hard outlines and boldly-drawn...
The roadless island of Canna is a moorland plateau of black basalt rock, just 5 miles long and 1.25 miles wide. Compass Hill (143m), at the north-eastern corner, contains enough magnetite (an iron oxide material) to deflect the navigation compasses in passing yachts. The ferry arrives...
County Wicklow, with its moorland wastes and bare granite hills has a wealth of lovely valley, wooded glen, and smoking waterfall. Dean Swift likened it to “a frieze mantle fringed with gold lace”. Much of the coastland is low, being a drift covered plain, fringed...
"Sing the peasantry and then Hard-riding country gentlemen" County Meath – known as “royal Meath” from its ancient connection and the Kings of Tara – is a country of democratically level pastures, royally rich grasslands, slow rivers and humid airs. Its wide fields are necessarily intersected by...
Errigal (2466ft) is the tallest peak in the ice-carved Donegal Highlands. With its furrowed sides and the white screes of broken quartz it is far and away the finest of all conical mountains in Ireland. It is best approached by way of Dunlewy and one...
Just over a mile North of the city centre is the district called Old Aberdeen. He name is misleading – although Old Aberdeen is certainly old, the area around Castlegate is older still. This part of the City was originally called Aulton, from the Gaelic...
The traditional prophecy, attributed to St. Columbia, that “a stranger mounted on a white horse and bearing a shield of painted birds shall conquer Ulster” appeared to be fulfilled when John de Courcy headed the Norman invasion of Ulster in 1177. Gradually the Anglo-Norman overlords...
Dunluce (Dun Lios, the Fort of Enclosures) an Anglo-Norman castle build by Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, about 1300, was taken by the Chief of the MacDonnell clan Somhairle Buidhe (Yellow Charles) in 1560 who reconstructed it. In the wars with the Tudor England,...
Angus is a region of fertile farm land stretching north from Dundee- Scotland’s fourth largest city- to the Highland border. It’s an attractive area of broad straths (valleys) and low, green hills contrasting with the rich, red-brown soil of freshly ploughed fields. Romantic glens finger...