Waterford Heritage Trails

A 30-metre round tower and a Romanesque cathedral, standing over one of Ireland's oldest Christian settlements, founded by St Declan before Patrick ever arrived.

Visit a Cornish-style copper mine engine house and the geopark centre explaining the coastline's 18th- and 19th-century mining boom.

Cappoquin House, rebuilt after a 1923 fire and still home to its historic gardens, a five-arch bridge over the Glenshelane, and the old market house, church, convent and railway station of a Blackwater valley town — 6 stops through Cappoquin.

Walk from the working quay at Cheekpoint — once a mail-packet port for boats to Wales — up past the village's old fishing grounds and Minaun Hill to the medieval church ruins and Georgian mansion at Faithlegg. Along the way, trace how one improving landlord's vision of a boom village gave way to a quieter life of salmon fishing at the meeting of the Suir, Barrow and Nore.

A pair of 19th-century bridges over the Womanagh River and a mill race, a former Board of First Fruits church turned heritage centre standing in the grounds of a monastery reputedly founded by Saint Mochuda, and a Catholic church built just before Emancipation — 4 stops through a small Waterford village.

A polygonal Norman shell-keep castle used as a Garda station until the Civil War, a market house, and two separate churches both named for Saint Augustine — 8 stops through Dungarvan.

A cliff-top castle stronghold of the la Poer family, the medieval church ruin beside it, and a Victorian-era seaside village further down the Copper Coast where the Palliser and Galloway families kept a rambling seafront house for close to two centuries.

An 1824 Alexander Nimmo-designed lighthouse, a Modernist cliff-top pilot station, a red sandstone Church of Ireland church at Killea, and a former coastguard station turned private house — 4 stops through a Waterford fishing village of thatched cottages.

A short walk from a 13th-century church ruin with roots in the Anglo-Norman invasion to the Georgian house built centuries later by the parish's landlord family.

A village that barely existed before 1800, built up almost entirely by one family — walk from a shilling-a-year chapel ruin to the Gothic church that replaced it, past a thatched corner cottage and an empty 1930s barracks, out to the burned-and-rebuilt manor that funded it all.

An eight-arch railway viaduct now carrying the Waterford Greenway, twin corn and woollen mills that once drove the local economy, and a Gothic convent — 5 stops through Kilmacthomas.

From a Board of First Fruits church and a burnt-out thatched cottage to a revived Victorian railway station and the earthworks of a le Poer stronghold, this short Suir-valley loop follows Kilmeaden's story from the 1200s to the 21st-century Greenway.

Climb down a stone stile into a medieval churchyard beneath the Comeragh Mountains, where a rare hagioscope, three named holy wells still visited on St Brigid's Day, an 1840 chapel and the graves of five War of Independence dead all sit within a few dozen steps of each other.

A short walk above the Blackwater estuary linking a seven-century-old ruined church to the Georgian and Regency houses of the families who outlived it, all looking out across Youghal Harbour.

Lismore Castle overlooking the Blackwater, a Church of Ireland cathedral founded on the site of a 7th-century monastic university, and two bridges built for the Dukes of Devonshire — 10 stops through Lismore.

A 16th-century harbour fort that traded cannon fire with its twin across the water, and a failed Swiss colony turned into a notorious 1798 prison camp a mile south.

A vast cotton factory that once employed thousands under the Quaker Malcomson family, a Gothic Revival church with "Hindu Gothic" stone carving, and the planned streets of one of Ireland's great model industrial villages — 5 stops through Portlaw.

A short loop through Waterford's only Gaeltacht village, from a roofless 1740s church and its old graveyard to the Irish college's water tower and handball alley, by way of a thatched cottage and ruined farm outbuildings.

Wander the one street of Stradbally from a fortified 13th-century church ruin to the Uniacke-era square and the twin churches that still face each other across the village's history.

A memorial to sculptor John Hogan, born in the town in 1800, a disused Church of Ireland church once dedicated to two saints, and a Georgian bridge over the Glenboy River — 4 stops through Tallow.

A single Georgian street where a 1783 assembly-rooms-turned-theatre shares its walls with City Hall, and where crystal-making returned to within sight of where it began. 3 stops linking Waterford's civic, theatrical and craft history.

A National-rated Gothic Revival Catholic church designed by James Joseph McCarthy, a Church of Ireland church with a memorial to the 1816 wreck of the troopship Sea Horse, a 19th-century convent, the site of one of the area's earliest schools, and a disused 1853 railway station burnt in 2002 — 5 stops through a Waterford seaside resort town.

Ireland's oldest city's oldest quarter — a 54-foot Anglo-Norman tower that gave Waterford its motto, a neoclassical cathedral called the finest 18th-century church in Ireland, and a Franciscan ruin that sheltered Huguenot refugees. 3 stops through the walled core the Vikings founded.

Walk the single planned street of a Georgian linen-weaving village built from nothing by an earl in the 1740s — a church, a rectory, a school and a memorial fountain still standing exactly where he laid them out.

Ireland's earliest surviving post-Reformation Catholic church, a cathedral and Bishop's Palace both designed in part by John Roberts, and a City Hall built into the medieval town wall — 12 stops through Waterford, Ireland's oldest city.

Climb from Waterford's old pig-fair green to the gaol wall that fell and the hillside school where the Christian Brothers began — a short, steep loop through the city's working-class heart.

From a rebuilt Georgian river bridge and a market square trading since the 1400s, up John Street's tall terraced houses to the grand bow-fronted townhouses of The Mall — where Waterford's tricolour first flew in 1848.