Longford Heritage Trails

A Cistercian abbey founded in 1150 under O'Farrell patronage, and the river bridge nearby that has been rebuilt at least twice since a surveyor first marked a crossing here in 1652.

Saint Patrick's Church, briefly a cathedral and still Maria Edgeworth-adjacent in its Longford diocese, William Hague's spectacular Saint Brigid's church with an altar rail carved by Patrick Pearse's father, the richly carved 1863 Fetherston memorial clock tower at the village green, and the unrestored ruins of Saint Mel's early cathedral — 4 stops through a planned Fetherston estate village.

A Neolithic portal tomb old enough to have named the village around it, a churchyard whose oldest grave predates its own church by 23 years, a Gothic country church raised on a Board of First Fruits grant, and the best-preserved of seven ringforts that once ringed this corner of Longford near Lough Gowna.

A Romanesque church built to replace an 1825 chapel, a single-arch bridge over the Camlin River, and the cottage from which a flying column commander defended his village against a hundred Crown soldiers in 1920.

A former barracks turned battle museum, standing watch over a cannon from 1798, and the battlefield itself, where the final major engagement of the Irish Rebellion ended in General Humbert's surrender.

A triple-arch bridge over the River Inny with roots to the 17th century, St Catherine's Church of Ireland, a Gothic Revival Catholic church built with Munich stained glass, a Georgian courthouse and market house now serving as the town library, and a statue honouring Oliver Goldsmith, raised nearby at Pallas — 5 stops through a Longford market town.

Two 19th-century feats of Shannon engineering meet where the Royal Canal reaches the river: a canal harbour and a limestone road bridge, built a generation apart.

A 1981 memorial to three days in 1881 when tenants resisted eviction, a working corn mill that ran for nearly two centuries, a rare rural art deco house, the 1907 church that replaced Drumlish's vanished first chapel, and the old cemetery where that chapel once stood.

Saint John's Church, burial place of the author Maria Edgeworth beneath a spire designed by her own father, the Edgeworth family seat that once hosted Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth, a Georgian rectory that gave France a priest at the foot of the guillotine, and a Gothic Revival Catholic church on land the Edgeworths donated — 4 stops through one family's imprint on a Longford town.

A five-minute stroll around one Killoe crossroads village — an 1828 chapel, a graveyard opened when the old one filled up, a hall built on raffled cars and New York dollars, an award-winning pub, and a garden remembering the parish's own Titanic passengers.

One of the largest and best-preserved Norman motte-and-bailey earthworks in Ireland, the medieval Anglo-Norman borough town replanned in the 1600s, a 15th-century Gaelic Irish castle seized from the O'Farrells, and two standing stones — 4 stops through a Longford heritage town.

Visit two of the six medieval churches built within a single monastic cashel on this Lough Ree island, founded in the 6th century by St Diarmuid.

An Iron Age bog road built in 148 BC and swallowed by the peat within a season, and a countess's Gothic Revival church built two thousand years later on the same stretch of Longford bogland.

A Gothic Revival church rebuilt in 1837 on a graveyard already old by 1710, the rector's plain Georgian house, an 1829 Catholic church raised on land the Royal Canal Company donated, and the canal bridge and lock-keeper's house that once served the boats passing through Killashee.

A six-arch Shannon bridge linking Leinster and Connacht, a Puginesque parish church built on the site of a viscount's converted abbey, and the ruined stump of an eighteenth-century corn windmill above Lough Ree.

Follow the road from Legan's 18th-century bridge and parish church out to the old Fox Hall estate, where a ruined church still guards the effigy tomb of Sir Nathaniel Fox.

A Tudor Revival mansion built for the judge said to have inspired Jane Austen's Mr Darcy, and the Georgian stable courtyards James Gandon designed decades before it.

St Mel's Cathedral, dramatically restored after a devastating 2009 Christmas Day fire, the county courthouse, an army barracks, and a former post office turned museum — 4 stops through the Longford county town.

A short loop through a Longford village where two rival parish churches, a Georgian rectory and a Victorian schoolhouse all still stand within a few hundred metres of one another.

A lakeside village once called the 'Round Hill of the Cauldron,' a tower house granted to the future founder of Maryland, an old hilltop church whose people once worshipped in secret at mass rocks, a monastic island founded in 544 AD, and an unusually grand 1833 church that still dominates the skyline.

The seat of the Earls of Granard since the early 1600s, from a Gothic Revival castle rebuilt in the 1860s by architect J.J. McCarthy to a Scottish Baronial gate house and stable block, and a parish church with box pews reputedly unique in Ireland.

Circle the green where a royal fiant chartered a fair four centuries ago, then step into a churchyard holding medieval cross-slabs, a judge's memorial by a renowned Dublin sculptor, and a gravestone that names its own victim's killer.