Westmeath Heritage Trails

Athlone Castle guarding the Shannon crossing since the 1200s, site of a famous 1691 Williamite siege, Sean's Bar with its long-told claim to be one of the oldest pubs in Ireland, a twin-spired Catholic church with Harry Clarke glass, a 17th-century church tower, and a memorial to tenor John McCormack — 5 stops through the town where Leinster meets Connacht.

A Gilbertine abbey that once briefly served as a cathedral, a ruined hilltop castle standing guard above it, a lakeside fort that survived a burned-out royal Christmas in 1315 and a decisive siege in 1691, a church begun in the Famine and finished decades later, and a roofless 1827 ruin sharing its graveyard with a chapel two centuries older again.

A Royal Canal harbour village built almost entirely by 19th-century canal trade, its bridge and basin still shaping the settlement today.

A market house and courthouse that survived an 1831 riot and an 1921 Black and Tans burning, the unchanged Victorian interior of Saint Michael's Catholic Church, and the spired Church of Ireland church whose 1887 tower clock memorializes the 4th Earl of Longford — 3 stops around the planned square of a Westmeath village.

A short loop through the seat of the Geoghegan chiefs, from a medieval abbey graveyard and its 1671 mortuary chapel to a Gothic Revival church, a Georgian rectory, an old RIC barracks and a Celtic Revival cemetery.

A Georgian house rebuilt as a Gothic castle for the family of Lawrence of Arabia, and the obelisk they raised nearby to honour the man who brought the potato to Ireland.

A short lakeside-village loop past two 19th-century churches, a Smyth-endowed schoolhouse, a pair of prize-winning estate cottages, and the farm buildings that once served them.

A Norman motte-and-bailey castle that became a five-storey stone gaol, and the Victorian castle a family built two centuries later to look older than it really is, modelled on the medieval ruin it overlooks.

A Benedictine abbey said to be built upon a bog, the earlier church of St Féichín with its miraculously raised lintel stone, the Anchorite's Cell where a hermit lived walled into a tower, and a holy well tied to local legend — 4 stops among the "Seven Wonders of Fore," one of Ireland's richest concentrations of monastic tradition.

An estate village of rose-covered cottages built by the Handcock family to serve Waterstown House — a Richard Castle-designed Palladian mansion now a roofless ruin, standing beside its own National-rated walled garden.

Locke's Distillery, reputedly the oldest licensed pot still distillery in the world, still turning its Brosna-fed waterwheel since 1757, the walled graveyard on the site of a vanished 12th-century Cistercian monastery, and the five-arch Coola Bridge carrying the Mullingar road over the river and its old millrace — 3 stops through a Westmeath river town.

A village built on a 6th-century monastic site: St Etchen's Church with its Pakenham vault, an 1830s market house that once appeared in a William Trevor film adaptation, a grand derelict rectory, a pair of stonemason-built terraces, and a Norman motte raised by Hugh de Lacy just outside the village.

Walk the length of a town that was once a full day's coach journey from Dublin — from a 17th-century coach-road bridge and a thatch-roofed vernacular terrace, past a probable RIC barracks and a Main Street corner pub, to the church built on the old market-house site and a graveyard where the parish's earlier chapel once stood.

A royal ringfort and the lake crannog beside it once formed the seat of the kings of Mide — and the place where High King Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill died in 1022.

The mythical 'navel of Ireland,' where a 30-ton stone marked the meeting of the ancient provinces, and the earthwork fortress crowning the hill above it.

A 1550 tower house rebuilt three times by the Quaker family who came to own it, their plain burial ground behind Main Street, and a Georgian house that grew into a Carmelite convent.

The Cathedral of Christ the King with its striking Boris Anrep mosaics, the former Wellington Barracks, a Victorian market house, the Royal Canal's stone aqueducts over the Brosna, and Belvedere House with its curious "Jealous Wall" folly on nearby Lough Ennell — 5 stops through the Westmeath county town.

A medieval Franciscan church founded in 1306 and still in active use, and the Victorian friary complex built over the cloisters that English raiders once burned.

A protected ringfort predating the Normans, a hillside graveyard above a bend in the River Deel, an 1834 chapel of ease with a stained-glass window paid for by New York emigrants, a two-phase stone bridge, and a rare-surviving 18th-century vernacular house at the village's edge.

Follow the old Mullingar-to-Longford road through a small north Westmeath village that quietly kept two Board of First Fruits-era churches, a rectory, a Gothic Revival Catholic church and a rare thatched cottage all within walking distance of each other.

A 1186 Norman motte-and-bailey castle whose Tyrrell lords held it for four centuries, two nineteenth-century churches — one Board of First Fruits, one with possible Mayer of Munich glass — a 1955 Bord na Móna workers' estate designed by Frank Gibney, and the bridge over the River Derry that gave the whole village its name.

From a Norman earthwork and a church built over an even older one, past a mill that may have lit an Irish village for the first time, to the ruined observatory where a Westmeath astronomer measured the heat of the sun.

The last surviving castle of the Tyrrell family, a neoclassical schoolhouse a countess gave her village, and the Gothic church she built to overlook the crescent-shaped green she laid out.