Narrow Water Castle at the bottle-neck of the Newry Water which runs into Carlingford Lough was built after the restoration of Charles II, to protect the commercial town of Newry and its strategic hinterland of Down, Armagh, and Louth. It stands on the site of...
Inistioge (“Teoc’s or Tighe’s Island”) is a most pleasant example of the little Irish village with church, cross, spirit-grocery, petrol-pump grouped round a quiet shadowy square. Time stands still, and the children under the lime-trees wait happily for the bus that has forgotten to come....
“Praise the beach when you come to it”, runs the Gaelic saying, and Rossnowlagh (the Wood of the Apples) is entirely praiseworthy. Donegal, with its thousand tongues stuck out at the sea, has more than its fair share of fine bays and creeks and beaches....
Mount Brandon, austere and impressive at all times, cloudy at most times, dominates Brandon Bay across whose waters the light and biddable curraghs – lath-and-canvas canoes – have bounded for a millennium and more. It was from this bay, they say, that St. Brendan and...
On the road from Limerick to Killarney is Adare (Ath Dara, the ford of the oaks) on the river Maigue. In its well-wooded setting, with medieval church ruins and neat thatched cottages, it is a surprisingly lovely village. Once an O’Donovan stronghold, it was taken...
It was in the Mournes I learnt that there is no better way to know the nerve of a mountain than by walking up a stream to its source. And by that I mean walking in the stream. Every step is a watery one, and...
Ardmore, with its smooth beach, its colour-washed cottages and green fields is the pleasantest of places. It was once an Episcopal see which for centuries ranked high among the high places of Ireland. For it is said to have been founded by St. Declan who...
The Custom House, erected between the years 1781 and 1791, at a cost of £546,000, is the finest public building in Dublin; it represents the flowering of Dublin commerce and Irish parliamentary power in the 18th century. James Gandon, whose master piece it was, and...
Groined by deep glens and walled along the west by the bare hilltops and the tufted moors, this rim of arable that ends in foam… The lovely Nine Glens bite deeply into the basalts of the Antrim plateau and into the hard overlays of modern history....
To see the landscape of Tuscany for the first time is like looking at the Old Masters; only they have been cleaned and are life-size. To see the lakes of Killarney for the first time is to realise that this haunting luxuriance of mountain, waterfall,...