Famine

Although no longer strictly an Island since the construction of a road to the mainland, Achill retains the sense of being a place apart.

There are beautiful secluded beaches, good places to stay and eat and many historic places to visit, including a deserted and ruined ‘famine village’.

This fascinating centre tells the often tragic story of Irish emigration in a most vivid way and also commemorates the departure of the Titanic from Cove on its final voyage.

Not a traditional museum, it has reconstructions of what life was like in an emigrant ship and is located in the train stations which was the their last stop in Ireland.

The Burren is a unique landscape, a vast limestone plateau stretching inland from the Cliffs of Moher, below which is a subterranean world of caves, rivers and lakes.

In Spring and Summer it is ablaze with flowers, many of them rare, which attract abundant bees, butterflies and birds. There are literally hundreds of megalithic remains here, the most famous being the Poulnabrone Dolmen.

When the potato arrived in Ireland it seemed like a godsend, easily grown and nutritious enough to sustain whole families on little else. The Irish climate suited it well and before long it was the staple food of almost the entire population.

A better fed Irish population began to grow rapidly, increasing from less than 1 million in 1580 to over 8 million by 1840.

Cavan County Museum will primarily be of interest to those with a connection to the area, but it is a good local museum which tells the story of Co Cavan through many historic items discovered or collected locally.

In addition to the museum there is a good craft shop and a particularly nice cafe that’s worth dropping into if you are in the area.

With a growing population locked in poverty and almost entirely dependent on the potato for sustenance, Ireland was by the mid 19th century something of a disaster waiting to happen.

Nobody however could have predicted the extent of the catastrophic famine that hit the people of Ireland when the potato crop repeatedly failed. It would change Ireland for centuries.