Things to Do in County Longford

More about County Longford

Where to base yourself

Longford has fewer beds than almost any county in Ireland, so decide early. Longford town is the obvious base — it has the hotels, the supermarkets, the cathedral and a station on the Dublin–Sligo line, which makes it one of the few midland bases you can reach without a car. It is a working market town rather than a pretty one, but everything in the county is inside forty minutes of it.

North, Granard suits you if you want the lakes around Lough Gowna and the Cavan border. West, Lanesborough sits astride the Shannon at the top of Lough Ree with a handful of guesthouses and a long angling tradition. Newtowncashel and the Cashel peninsula are the quietest option, all narrow lanes down to the lake. Edgeworthstown is on the N4 and useful if you’re really just passing through.

The single biggest supply of beds in the county is Center Parcs Longford Forest near Ballymahon, which opened in 2019 and books months out for school holidays and midterms — worth knowing, because it also lifts prices in the surrounding towns on the same weekends. Outside those dates, and outside the Granard and Ballymahon festival weekends, you can usually find something at short notice.

Lough Ree and the water

The western edge of the county is all Shannon. Barley Harbour near Newtowncashel is a small working slip with a pier, a picnic area and views straight down Lough Ree — the sort of place you go for an hour with a flask rather than a full afternoon. Boats from the harbours here reach the lake’s monastic islands: Inchcleraun, known locally as Quaker Island, holds the ruins of six churches from a monastery founded in the 6th century, and in legend is where Queen Medb of Connacht was killed. Saints’ Island has an Augustinian priory and can be reached on foot along a causeway, though it is boggy underfoot and best done in dry weather with proper boots.

Angling is the county’s quiet speciality. The River Inny and the lakes around Lough Gowna — where the Erne rises — hold bream, tench and roach, and Longford is one of the cheaper places in the country to fish. One thing worth knowing if you’re coming on old information: the warm-water stretch below the power station at Lanesborough, which drew anglers from across Europe for decades, cooled after the plant stopped generating in 2020, and the fishing there is no longer what the guidebooks describe.

The greenway

The Royal Canal Greenway runs about 130 km from Maynooth to the Shannon and its final stretch is Longford’s. It’s flat, traffic-free and surfaced, which makes it the best family cycling in the midlands, and you can bite off ten or fifteen kilometres rather than commit to the whole thing. The stretch between Abbeyshrule and the harbour at Cloondara, where the canal finally drops into the Camlin and the Shannon, is the most interesting section, with locks, an aqueduct over the Inny and very little traffic. Bike hire is limited in the county itself, so arrange it before you arrive.

Bog, battles and standing stones

Corlea is the county’s headline find, but the hall that shelters it runs on a visitor season rather than year-round opening, so check before making the trip in winter. The bog around it is worth walking in its own right.

At Ballinamuck, a small village in the north of the county, General Humbert’s Franco-Irish army was cut down and forced to surrender on 8 September 1798, ending the rising in Connacht. There’s a modest interpretive centre in the old schoolhouse and a monument, and the bog walks nearby put you on the ground it was fought over. Aughnacliffe has one of the more dramatic dolmens in the midlands, its capstone propped at an angle that looks temporary and has held for five thousand years. Abbeylara is a Cistercian ruin with a sheela-na-gig carved into it, free and open, and rarely has anyone else in it.

Wet days and small museums

St Mel’s Cathedral in Longford town is the one indoor sight that would draw a crowd in any county: gutted by fire on Christmas Day 2009 and rebuilt over five years at a cost of around €30 million, it reopened on Christmas Eve 2014 with a bright, pared-back interior and a small museum of diocesan pieces. It’s free to walk into.

Knights & Conquests at the foot of the Granard motte covers the Norman arrival with armour you can handle, which works with children on a wet afternoon. The Maria Edgeworth Centre in a restored schoolhouse in Edgeworthstown does the county’s literary story. For a walk that doesn’t depend on the weather clearing, Derrycassan Wood on Lough Gowna and the boardwalk loop at Leebeen Park are both short, waymarked and sheltered.