Things to Do in County Monaghan

More about County Monaghan

Where to base yourself

Monaghan is an hour and a half from Dublin and forty minutes from Belfast’s motorway, which makes it a stopover county for a lot of people — but the towns are close enough together that wherever you land, nothing is more than half an hour away. Monaghan town is the practical base: hotels, the cathedral, the museum and the heritage trail all on foot, and a good spread of pubs. Glaslough north of it is the other end of the scale, a neat estate village where the rooms are mostly at Castle Leslie and priced accordingly; the lodge side is more affordable than the castle itself, and weddings take out most summer weekends.

In the south, Carrickmacross is the busiest market town and the handiest for the Louth and Meath border, while Castleblayney puts you on the shore of the county’s biggest lake. Anglers usually pick Ballybay, which has lakes on three sides and coarse fishing stands within walking distance of the town. Clones in the west is quiet and cheap, and worth a night if you want the border country. Book ahead for the two weeks around the Ulster football finals and for any weekend Castle Leslie has an event on; otherwise you can usually turn up.

Drumlins and water

The drumlins here sit close together and the lakes fill the gaps, so the county is more water than it looks on a map. Lough Muckno at Castleblayney is the biggest, wrapped in a few hundred acres of forest park with lakeshore loops, a boat slip and watersports in season — it is the one place in Monaghan that feels busy on a hot Sunday. Emy Lough has a small inland beach and shallow water that suits families, and Hollywood Lake is the local swimming spot, with a crannóg out in the middle of it.

For getting on the water rather than beside it, the Dromore River system on the Cavan border is a proper day’s canoeing down to Cootehill, and at Clones the restored stretch of the Ulster Canal has a marina and a towpath walk that is flat, wide and good in any weather. Coarse fishing is the county’s real sporting draw, and the season and permits are worth checking locally before you travel.

Woods, bog and border hills

Rossmore Forest Park, three or four kilometres south-west of Monaghan town, is the easy walk — mixed woodland, a lake, some enormous redwoods and the terraces of the demolished Rossmore Castle, with waymarked loops from twenty minutes to an hour. Dartrey Forest near Rockcorry is the better one if you have longer: forest tracks around Dromore Lake and, in a clearing, the Dawson mausoleum, an 18th-century marble monument that was in ruins for decades and has since been restored.

Higher and wilder, Sliabh Beagh straddles the border with Tyrone and Fermanagh — blanket bog, forestry and waymarked routes out to the Three County Hollow, boggy underfoot most of the year and best after a dry spell. Mullyash Mountain in the south-east is a much shorter effort for a summit cairn and a view that on a clear day reaches across most of Ulster. If your idea of the outdoors is louder, Rally School Ireland at Scotstown runs half-day driving sessions and needs booking well ahead.

Lace, famine and the border

Two towns made lace and both still show it. In Carrickmacross the appliqué tradition is worked and sold at the lace gallery in the town, with the nearby village of Donaghmoyne claiming its origin; in Clones the crochet version has its own museum at the canal stores, and the Cassandra Hand Centre sets both trades in their real context — they were famine relief work, taught to keep women alive. The Carrickmacross Workhouse, one of the few substantially intact workhouse buildings in the country, is the hardest and best of the county’s historic sites.

Clones itself repays an hour’s walk: the round tower and the carved sarcophagus in the old graveyard, the high cross in the Diamond, and the ruins at St Tiernach’s and the abbey site all within a few streets. Further east, Mannan Castle is a rare Norman motte with a double bailey, more earthwork than masonry. The border’s more recent history is not hidden here either — the columns of Monaghan Courthouse still carry damage from a 1974 bomb, and the County Museum at the Peace Campus tells that story properly and without charge.

Kavanagh country

Inniskeen in the far south-east is where Patrick Kavanagh was born and is buried, and the Patrick Kavanagh Centre in the old church runs a walking trail through the fields and townlands of the poems. Opening is seasonal and hours are limited, so ring ahead rather than driving over on spec. Even without the centre, the road out past Mucker and the Fane valley is the most direct way to understand what Monaghan’s small fields and stony grey soil actually look like.