Laois Heritage Trails

A Georgian mansion built in 1773 for the de Vesci family, a planned Georgian and Victorian Main Street relocated wholesale around 1790, a market house turned library, a Church of Ireland church rebuilt twice in the 19th century, and a former school turned heritage museum with a Titanic carpet-factory connection — 5 stops through one of Ireland's finest planned estate towns.

A 6th-century monastery plundered by Vikings and rebuilt as a Dominican friary, standing beside the earthen motte Norman lords later raised on the same ground.

A Lutyens-designed sunken garden with a fountain at its centre, and a Gothic Revival church whose stained glass windows came all the way from Munich.

A six-storey O'More and Bowen tower house, the ivy-clad medieval church that stood beside it, two ancient wells said to carry St Patrick's blessing, and the parish's 1830s chapel — a short rural walk through five centuries of one Laois estate.

A Regency mansion built for a baronet by a father-and-son team of architects, and the gate lodge finished decades later to the same architect's posthumous designs.

The earthwork motte and bailey that founded an ancient village, the stone castle the O'More lords built on top of that legacy in the 14th century, a Georgian Church of Ireland church, the burned-out site of the 1920 RIC barracks, and an 1888 national school in a village that has been teaching its children since 1686.

From the Fitzpatrick castle that guarded the pass into Munster to a 6th-century monastic site founded by St Molua, this trail covers the deep history behind a small Laois village.

A five-minute stroll around a Slieve Bloom foothill village: a roofless Georgian Gothic chapel and its 19th-century graveyard, the parish church that succeeded it, a garden naming every townland in the parish, and a thatched cottage honouring a forgotten local poet.

A Slieve Bloom gateway village on an old road into Munster, with a three-tiered forest waterfall in the hills just beyond it.

A five-storey tower house that survived two 15th-century sieges only to fall to Cromwell's cannon, its ruined private chapel across the road, a 6th-century priory whose patron saint still watches over the area, and the site of a hereditary Gaelic medical school that trained physicians for over a century.

The Rock of Dunamase, a dramatic ruined hilltop stronghold linked by marriage to Strongbow and destroyed by Cromwellian forces in 1650, alongside a former church, courthouse, and star-shaped fort in the county town of Portlaoise — 4 stops through the Laois midlands.

A planned Georgian estate village laid out by the Flower family from 1708 around a Queen Anne manor house, a church standing near the possible site of St Fintan's 6th-century monastery, and a broad square that spent over two centuries as a Kilkenny enclave stranded inside Laois.

James Gandon's unfinished-then-finished neo-Classical mansion, the only church he ever designed, and a Gothic Revival Catholic church holding a countess's memorial by a sculptor of royal renown.

A quiet village trail south of the green, tracing a cluster of sites linked to Saint Kieran — a ruined medieval church, a scarred 17th-century wayside cross, and the recorded but unmarked ground of an early monastery, holy tree and holy well.

One of Ireland's finest Romanesque doorways, the site of a round tower demolished over a farmer's fear for his cattle, an early medieval ringfort, an 1820s Catholic church, and the hillside view that earns Killeshin its nickname, the Balcony of Carlow.

A Georgian townhouse on the square once named for an earl, a neo-Classical courthouse from 1839, and a hall that began life as a Methodist chapel — the built legacy of a Quaker town once called the Manchester of Ireland.

A Georgian Gothic Church of Ireland church, the Gothic Revival Catholic church that gave the town its steeple in 1867, and a terrace named for the Earls of Mountrath, the family whose name the town itself carries.

Walk the streets of a 17th-century Huguenot refugee town once nicknamed 'the Paris of the Midlands' — from the French church and graveyard on Market Square to Georgian merchant houses, a Victorian railway junction, and the Catholic church across the Barrow on the Offaly bank.

The neo-classical Portlaoise Courthouse with its curious curved corner, the vermiculated stone facade of the old county gaol turned arts centre next door, the castellated gate of a prison still in use since 1830, and the round bastion of Fort Protector, the earliest surviving structure in the town — 4 stops through the historic core of Maryborough.

A Georgian Gothic church on a site that may hide a medieval ringfort, a castellated former glebe house, a Tudor Gothic gate lodge, the cobbled grave of a hanged United Irishman from 1798, and a modern stone honouring a Rathdowney-born soldier who held out for 96 hours in Flanders.

Home of the Irish Steam Preservation Society and its famous steam rally, the Gothic Revival St Patrick's Church, a limestone bridge tied to a local 16th-century skirmish, Stradbally Hall, seat of the Cosby family since the plantation era, and the early monastic site of Oughaval founded by St Colman — 5 stops through a Laois heritage village.

One of Ireland's finest Hiberno-Romanesque round towers, its carved doorway once facing a medieval church later converted into a Cosby tower house in 1609, and a former Church of Ireland church across the footbridge, now the village heritage centre — 3 stops around a 7th-century monastic site founded by St Mochua.

Trace the Grand Canal's Barrow Line through this small harbour village, from the humpback bridge and quayside grain store to the school and house the Grattan-Bellew family left behind.