From Dublin: Bunratty Castle, Cliffs of Moher & Ennis

Bunratty Castle was built in 1425 by the MacNamara clan and quickly passed to the powerful O'Brien dynasty — the Kings of Thomond (County Clare and Limerick) — who used it as their principal residence throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. The four-storey tower house is one of the most complete medieval tower castles in Ireland: its Great Hall, Solar, Chapel and prisoner dungeons are all accessible, furnished with genuine 15th and 16th-century furniture, tapestries, weapons and artefacts assembled from European collections. The guide covers the extraordinary history of the O'Brien dynasty — descendants of the 11th-century High King of Ireland Brian Boru — and their centuries of resistance to English rule, using Bunratty as both a residence and a political statement. The surrounding Folk Park was created in 1960 to rescue and reconstruct examples of 19th-century rural Irish architecture: a Golden Vale farmhouse, a Clare farmhouse, a Crannog (island dwelling), a village street with pub, post office and printer's shop, and a medieval walled herb garden.

Ennis was the medieval capital of County Clare — the seat of the O'Brien kings of Thomond, whose patronage of the Franciscan order created the Ennis Friary in 1241. The friary church contains the finest collection of medieval sculpture in Munster: a 15th-century Ecce Homo, the McMahon tomb with its carved Passion scenes, and the remarkable figure of St Francis with the stigmata, all carved in local limestone with extraordinary naturalism. The guide covers the political geography of Clare in the medieval period and the role of Ennis as the administrative centre of the O'Brien territory. On the drive toward the Cliffs, pass the Burren — a 250 square-kilometre limestone plateau of bare karst, glacial boulders and rare orchids, created when the ice sheets stripped the topsoil 15,000 years ago. The Burren's botanical uniqueness (Arctic, Alpine and Mediterranean plants growing side by side due to the mild Atlantic climate) has made it a UNESCO Geopark.

The Cliffs of Moher rise from the Atlantic along 8 kilometres of County Clare coastline, reaching their maximum height of 214 metres at Knockardakin. The cliffs are formed of alternating layers of shale and sandstone deposited 320 million years ago when this region lay at the bottom of a shallow tropical sea — the distinct horizontal banding in the cliff face is the preserved sediment of that ancient seabed. The cliff edge provides a view of extraordinary scale: looking north toward Galway Bay and the Aran Islands (their stone walls visible on clear days), looking south to Loop Head, and looking west toward the open Atlantic with nothing between here and Newfoundland. O'Brien's Tower, a Victorian folly built by landowner Cornelius O'Brien in 1835 as a viewing tower for tourists (making the Cliffs one of the oldest tourist attractions in Ireland), marks the highest accessible point. The Atlantic seabird colony on the cliff faces includes razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes and (seasonally) puffins.