Beautiful places to visit in Ireland: the best sites, county by county

Most lists of beautiful places in Ireland are ranked, and ranking them is the least useful thing you can do with them. Which of these places to visit in Ireland is best depends entirely on where you are starting and how many days you have, so this page is arranged by county instead.

Read it as a menu rather than a league table. The best places to visit in Ireland for a week on the west coast are not the ones worth two days out of Dublin, and pretending otherwise is what makes ranked lists useless.

What each entry tries to give you is the thing a photograph cannot: how long it takes, how busy it gets, and whether it is worth the detour from wherever you already are.

The western counties carry most of what people actually travel for, and they reward depth over breadth. Four counties, each genuinely different from the others.

The southwest has the highest concentration of beautiful places in Ireland and the highest concentration of traffic to match. The peninsulas are the point, and there are more of them than the famous two.

The Dingle Peninsula is the one to choose if you can only do one. The Slea Head drive is a loop of about fifty kilometres with archaeology, cliffs and beaches stacked on top of each other, and Dingle town is a genuinely good base rather than a service stop.

The Ring of Kerry is the famous circuit around the Iveragh Peninsula. It is beautiful and it is busy, and coach traffic runs it in one direction, which is worth knowing before you set off the other way. Killarney National Park at its eastern end is the best of it for anyone who would rather walk than drive.

Beara and Sheep's Head are the quieter peninsulas further south, in Cork and partly in Kerry. Less infrastructure, fewer coaches, and for many people a better day than the Ring.

Skellig Michael sits off the Kerry coast and is the one entry on this page you cannot simply turn up for. Landings run in summer only, are strictly limited, and are cancelled routinely in poor sea conditions. Book well ahead and hold the day loosely.

If you are in Dublin with two or three days, driving west is usually the wrong call. The east has the country's deepest history within an hour or two of the capital.

Newgrange in the Boyne Valley, County Meath, predates the pyramids at Giza. Its alignment with the winter solstice sunrise is why it is famous, and access to the chamber is by guided tour from the visitor centre rather than directly at the mound.

Glendalough in County Wicklow is an early monastic settlement in a glacial valley with two lakes, an hour from Dublin and walkable in several directions. It is the single best day trip from the capital.

The Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary is a medieval complex on a limestone outcrop visible for miles, and it is on the natural line between Dublin and Cork rather than a detour from it.

Kilkenny has the best-preserved medieval core of any Irish town and works as an overnight stop rather than an hour's walk.

A list is defined as much by its omissions as by its entries, so here are the ones people ask about.

The Blarney Stone is a queue. The castle and gardens around it are pleasant and the stone itself is a twenty-minute wait to lie on your back over a gap in a parapet. It appears on every ranking of the best places to visit in Ireland and it earns that place through recognition rather than through the experience.

The Ring of Kerry is on this page but with a caveat rather than a recommendation, because the Dingle Peninsula next door delivers a similar landscape with a fraction of the coach traffic. If you have one day in Kerry, Dingle is the better use of it.

The Cliffs of Moher are genuinely spectacular and genuinely oversubscribed. Nothing about the cliffs disappoints; the experience of visiting them between eleven and four in July does. Slieve League is higher and emptier, and the Burren beside the cliffs is more unusual than either.

Temple Bar is not a beautiful place in Ireland, it is a district in Dublin with high drink prices, and it is included here only because it is the single most common thing visitors are disappointed by. The pubs worth walking to are two streets in any direction from it.

The pattern behind all four is the same. The most photographed sites are not the most rewarding ones; they are the ones with the best car parks. Almost every entry in the western counties above is quieter than its reputation would suggest, and the two that are not are the two everybody names first.

Ireland's temperature barely moves across the year, so the season question is really about daylight, crowds and what is open.

June gives the longest days, and in the far northwest the light holds until around eleven at night, which effectively adds a day to a week. Donegal and Mayo benefit from that more than anywhere else, because their attractions are outdoors and unticketed.

September is the best compromise almost everywhere. Sea temperatures peak, the coastal crowds thin out after the Irish school holidays end, and most seasonal operations are still running. If there is a single month to pick for the best places to visit in Ireland on the west coast, this is it.

October to March closes a great deal on the coast: island ferries reduce or stop, smaller visitor centres shut, and the Skellig landings do not run at all. What opens up instead is the east, where Newgrange, Glendalough and Kilkenny are year-round propositions and are noticeably better without summer coach traffic.

Almost all of these places to visit in Ireland need a car. Public transport serves the cities well and the coastal routes barely at all, so the realistic alternatives to driving are day tours from Dublin, Galway, Killarney or Cork. Which airport you land at narrows the list more than most visitors expect, and the airport guide sets out which one serves which coast. If the car is the plan, so does driving in Ireland, which is where the road classes and the realistic average speeds are.

Day tours are better than their reputation for the harder-to-reach places. A coach to the Cliffs of Moher from Galway removes the parking problem entirely, and a guided boat to Skellig Michael is the only way to get there at all. Where they fall down is flexibility: a tour arrives when it arrives, which on this coast frequently means arriving in the one hour of the day when the weather is wrong.

Distances take longer than they look. The working rule is to take whatever a mapping app says and add half again, because the R-classified coastal roads are narrow and slow.

Parking is the quiet constraint at the famous stops between June and September. The Cliffs of Moher, Kylemore Abbey and the Giant's Causeway all have paid car parks that fill by late morning, and the overflow arrangements add a walk rather than solving anything. Arriving before ten or after four is the whole trick, and it also happens to be when the light is worth photographing.

One geographical point that affects bookings: the Giant's Causeway and the Causeway Coast are in Northern Ireland and therefore in the United Kingdom, which changes currency and mobile roaming. Everything else named on this page is in the Republic.

For how to string these into a route rather than a list, see the Wild Atlantic Way route guide, which covers how many days each section needs and the practicalities of driving in Ireland.