Roscommon Heritage Trails

Explore 400 years of coal-mining history at Ireland's first mining museum, and the decommissioned power station the valley's coal once fuelled.

A working water mill with its wheel reinstated in 2002, a six-arch stone bridge over the River Suck, a Catholic church rebuilt in the 1940s with stonework salvaged from a Galway country house, and a wayside Marian shrine — 4 stops through a Roscommon river village.

The Cathedral of the Annunciation and St Nathy, seat of the Diocese of Achonry, a college built around an 18th-century barracks, and a former hydroelectric power station that later served as the town's museum — 6 stops through a Roscommon cathedral town.

A 19th-century Catholic church and its parochial house, a former national school and courthouse later turned grocery shop, and a 17th-century graveyard holding the O'Conor Don mausoleum and the holy well that gave the townland its name — 4 stops through a Roscommon village.

A walk through the alder ford of Ballyfarnon and out to Lough Meelagh, tracing the life of harper-composer Turlough O'Carolan from the MacDermot Roe estate at Alderford where he was raised to the ruined gable at Kilronan where he was buried in 1738. An optional extension follows the same parish north to Arigna, where four centuries of coal mining ended in 1990.

A short riverside walk around a working Suck-side village, from its 1820s stone bridge and 1857 church to a disused Victorian pump and a rare seven-pier footbridge upstream.

A 12th-century Cistercian abbey, a restored Georgian mansion built for the King family, and a court house with a relief bust of Patrick Pearse — 12 stops through Boyle, Co. Roscommon.

A village built around a single holy well — follow the short main street from St Brigid's ancient pilgrimage site past the old school and handball alley to a memorial for one of Roscommon GAA's greatest sons.

A former Bridewell prison with its iron security bars still intact, a graveyard holding the grandfather of Oscar Wilde, and a market house at the heart of the town — 8 stops through Castlerea.

A tight loop around a River Boyle bridge village — a mid-19th-century stone bridge, the old Coote demesne gate, an 1845 parish church, and the barracks where writer John McGahern grew up.

A Catholic church, a Church of Ireland church at Killummod, the former outbuildings of Croghan House, and a pair of twin road bridges over a historic mill race — 4 stops through a small Roscommon village.

A restored 18th-century windmill a bishop built to feed the town, the ruined cathedral tradition says St Patrick himself founded, and the convent a Sister of Mercy opened in 1868 that still cares for the community today.

A crossroads village walk to a Penal-era church site and a medieval graveyard, extending further to a National Monument tower house with a rare sheela na gig, sitting on the edge of a protected turlough.

Trace the story of Douglas Hyde, Ireland's first President and co-founder of the Gaelic League, through his family's parish church and the estate house they leased in Frenchpark.

The grave of Turlough O'Carolan, the last of the great Irish bards, and the holy well across the road that reappeared after Cromwell's soldiers tried to bury it.

A rural loop around the Kilteevan crossroads and its outlying townlands: a restored 1819 church-turned-community-centre, a medieval church ruin with a Mapother crypt, a hidden Penal-era Mass rock in a ringfort, and a 1632-dated wayside cross — four small monuments spanning nearly a thousand years of one Roscommon parish's history.

Walk the main street of a village once famous across Ireland for its clay pipes — from the factory site burned in 1921 to the church, rectory and railway station that tell the story of its long rebuilding.

Nicknamed the 'Camelot of the Shannon,' a deserted 13th-century Norman town on a Lough Ree headland, complete with castle, town walls, and a Hospitaller priory.

From a Palladian mansion turned convent to a folklore holy well, a Fenian-linked schoolhouse and a Gothic parish church — a short loop through the old Dillon estate village of Loughglinn.

From the monastic graveyard that baptised the founder of Clonmacnoise to an Iron Age carved stone and one of Ireland's oldest inhabited castles, this trail threads through the quiet countryside southwest of Roscommon town.

A 13th-century Anglo-Norman castle, a Dominican friary founded by the King of Connacht, and a courthouse designed by Richard Morrison — 9 stops through Roscommon town.

A Palladian mansion and its stable-yard now home to the National Famine Museum, a courthouse and two churches, and a convent still known locally as Dún Maeve — 6 stops through the Roscommon estate town where the Great Famine's history is told in full.

Walk the river village of Tarmonbarry from its mid-nineteenth-century bridge and weir — where the Shannon Navigation Commissioners' engineering still regulates the river and carries the N5 across the Leinster–Connacht boundary — past the marina and Main Street. From there the trail points a few kilometres out toward Whitehall to Kilbarry, the ruined monastic 'termon' of St Berach that gave Tarmonbarry its name.

The mound where legend says Queen Medb ruled all of Connacht, one of over 240 sites in a ritual landscape still largely unexcavated, and the visitor centre that opened in 1999 to help make sense of it all.