Ireland Dublin + Cliffs of Moher

About this pack

Guinness Storehouse, Ring of Kerry, Cliffs of Moher, traditional pub sessions.

Inside the Ireland Dublin + Cliffs of Moher trip

Dublin is the capital and largest city of Ireland, situated on Dublin Bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, in the province of Leinster, and bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, part of the Wicklow Mountains range. It is the largest city by population on the island of Ireland: at the 2022 census, the city council area had a population of 592,713, the city including its suburbs had 1,263,219, and County Dublin as a whole had 1,501,500, though various definitions of a wider Greater Dublin Area also exist. This seven-day pack uses Dublin as its base while reaching west and south to County Clare and County Kerry, a shape that keeps the pack's traveller returning to the same city each night in the middle of the week even as the day trips themselves range across two other counties entirely.

In the city, the pack visits the Guinness Storehouse, a tourist attraction at St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin. Since it opened in 2000 it has received over twenty million visitors, a volume that places it among the most visited single attractions the pack takes in anywhere on this seven-day route. That the brewery itself, rather than a purpose-built museum elsewhere in the city, is what draws that scale of visitor says something about how closely the attraction is tied to the site of production rather than to a separate, standalone exhibit.

From Dublin the pack travels west to the Cliffs of Moher, sea cliffs at the southwestern edge of the Burren region in County Clare, running for about 14 kilometres. At their southern end, at Hag's Head, they rise 120 metres above the Atlantic Ocean, and eight kilometres to the north they reach their maximum height of 214 metres, just north of O'Brien's Tower, a round stone tower near the midpoint of the cliffs built in 1835 by Sir Cornelius O'Brien, before the cliffs continue on at lower heights. The closest settlements are the village of Liscannor, six kilometres to the south, and Doolin, seven kilometres to the north, small enough that the cliffs themselves remain the dominant feature of the landscape rather than any nearby town. The difference in height along the run, from 120 metres at the southern end to 214 metres further north, means the walk along the top edge changes character noticeably depending on which stretch the pack is on at a given moment.

The pack then loops south to the Ring of Kerry, a 179-kilometre circular tourist route in County Kerry. Travelling clockwise from Killarney, it follows the N71 to Kenmare, then the N70 around the Iveragh Peninsula to Killorglin, passing through Sneem, Waterville, Cahersiveen, and Glenbeigh along the way, before returning to Killarney via the N72. Covering the full loop means the pack spends a full day tracing the edge of the peninsula rather than visiting a single fixed site, moving through a sequence of small towns rather than pausing at one destination for most of the day the way the earlier stops in Dublin and at the cliffs allow.

The pack closes back in Dublin at Trinity College Dublin, officially the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin and the sole constituent college of the University of Dublin. Founded in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I through a royal charter, it is one of the seven ancient universities of Great Britain and Ireland and Ireland's oldest university. It contributed to Irish literature during the Victorian and Georgian eras and played a part in Dublin's recognition as a UNESCO City of Literature, a fitting place to end a week that began at a brewery and closed at a library-centred university founded more than four centuries earlier.

• Dublin — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Guinness Storehouse — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Cliffs of Moher — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Ring of Kerry — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Trinity College Dublin — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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Ireland Dublin + Cliffs of Moher, in frame

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