It may not quite be a jungle out there, but there’s a lot of wildlife in Ireland worth watching. Things with wings, fins, tails and talons, from the seas to the skies to all the grass, forest, bog and woodland in between. Erica Reed grabs her binoculars… When I think of whales, I always end [...]

As the author of The American Golfer’s Guide to Ireland, Bill Ruskin knows just how hard it is to pick between our famous greens – we are the ‘Emerald Isle’ after all. He offers some advice and tips for the American golfer in Ireland. Maybe the great game of golf was not invented in Ireland [...]

A new generation of adventure sports is making mountains look like mole-hills. Our guest blogger Mark Folens sets his sights on the weirdest, craziest, downright zaniest adventure sports around. I remember being an awed seven-year-old, watching rock climbers scale the granite heights of Dublin’s Dalkey Quarry. They seemed so rebellious, so daring… so utterly disregarding of [...]

You expect to smell salt in sea air. You expect sea air to blow your hair back like your hairdryer never could. You might even expect sea air to carry Johnny Depp swinging into port with a rose between his teeth. This summer in Galway, the sea air will be carrying something even more special; [...]

We’re not a big island. Ireland is roughly 81,000 square kms; about the size of the American State of Indiana, and just bit bigger than Scotland. So how is it that our landscapes are big business, and known for an epic vastness of changing skies, rolling hills and distant peaks? One answer would be Ciaran [...]

You’ve seen the videos: the monstrous Atlantic rollers that lash the Sligo and Donegal coast are some of the biggest in the world, and attract some of the best riders in the world to tame them. But what if you don’t have a trophy cabinet of little golden surfboards, or have never even stood on [...]

You could call Peter McCabe the landscape whisperer. He can coax out of an everyday scene the most evocative compositions. I’m talking clouds almost three-dimensional in their bouffant-ness, seas swelling and splashing against the picture, and sands so full of texture I fear they’ll scratch my screen. Lucky for us, this whisperer can wield a [...]

Ireland’s stunning churches, monasteries and ancient manuscripts all feature a dizzying array of Celtic motifs, including elegant knot symbols, round towers, and stately Celtic crosses. We’ve seen them on headstones, beautifying the facade of built-so-long-ago-it-hurts-to-think-about-it places like Newgrange and some of us are rocking necklaces, rings, bracelets and T-shirts with, until now, unknown symbols. What [...]

The way our stories tell it, Ireland’s just a land of leprechauns frolicking among four-leafed clovers and fairy mounds, of starry nights filled with púcas and banshees. Well, not quite, but this stuff is not just the preserve of childrens books either. Ireland’s myths, legends and superstitions are the legacy of a rich oral tradition. [...]

Irish whiskey has been around for centuries, with fans including Queen Elizabeth I and Peter the Great. When John Jameson came over to Ireland from Scotland in the late 1700s, Dublin was the centre of the whiskey world. Their sparkling rep came from using pot stills for distilling, and not using peat to stoke malting [...]