Things to Do in County Carlow

More about County Carlow

Where to base yourself

Carlow is the second-smallest county in Ireland and you can drive its length in under an hour, so choosing a base is about the kind of evening you want rather than about distance. Carlow town has almost all the county’s hotel rooms, the widest choice of places to eat and a station on the Dublin Heuston–Waterford line, which makes it the obvious base if you are arriving without a car. Leighlinbridge is a better place to wake up: a single street of stone houses either side of a bridge that has carried traffic since the 1320s, with the Black Castle ruin on the far bank and the M9 five minutes away. Borris suits walkers, sitting under Mount Leinster on the South Leinster Way with the Barrow a short drop below the village. Bagenalstown is the cheapest of the four and handy for the towpath. Out east, Clonegal is barely a village at all, but it puts you at the gates of Huntington Castle and on the Wexford border. Rooms are thin on the ground everywhere outside Carlow town, and the June festival weekends in Borris and Carlow will clear them out entirely, so book those well ahead.

Walking the Barrow

The Barrow Way runs 114 km from Lowtown in Kildare to St Mullins, and the Carlow stretch is the best of it — flat, grassy in places, gravelled in others, and never far from a lock keeper’s cottage. You do not need to walk it end to end. The three or four kilometres between Clashganny and Graiguenamanagh take in a lock, a weir and a wooded bend of the river where people swim on hot afternoons; the towpath north from Bagenalstown past Ballyellen Upper Lock is quieter and mostly empty on a weekday. St Mullins marks the tidal limit and the southern end of the Way, and the short millrace path behind the monastic site is walked barefoot by pilgrims each July. Above Borris, the old railway line crosses the valley on a sixteen-arch viaduct about 50 m up — a short, level walk with a long view down the Barrow.

Mount Leinster and the eastern hills

The Blackstairs run along the Wexford border and Mount Leinster tops out at 795 m, high enough that the summit mast is visible from half of Leinster. Most people stop at the Nine Stones, a small car park on the mountain road between Borris and Bunclody where eight counties are claimed on a clear day; the service track from there to the summit is a straightforward hour of steady climbing on tarmac. The road up is narrow, steep and unsalted, so leave it alone in ice or low cloud. Lower down, Kilbrannish Hill has waymarked forest loops and a picnic area with the same view for a fraction of the effort. The village of Kildavin is where the 102 km South Leinster Way begins, crossing the shoulder of the mountain to Borris on its way west. Hacketstown, up on the Wicklow side, was fought over twice in 1798 and still feels like a border town.

Granite, ruins and the older county

Carlow is granite country, and the stonework is what stays with you. Ballymoon Castle sits alone in a field east of Bagenalstown — a square of high granite walls, thirteenth-century, apparently never roofed and never finished. Old Leighlin is a hamlet built around St Laserian’s Cathedral, where a synod met in 630 to settle the dating of Easter. At Myshall, the Adelaide Memorial Church was raised by a grieving father in the 1900s as a scaled-down copy of Salisbury Cathedral, and it is a genuinely odd thing to come across in a village of that size. The Aghade holed stone and the granite bridge over the Slaney nearby are both roadside stops of five minutes each. Borris House has been the Kavanagh seat for centuries and opens for guided tours on limited dates, so check before you drive out.

Carlow town and the wet-day options

Carlow County Museum is free, occupies a former convent beside the cathedral and keeps the working gallows trapdoor from the old county gaol — the sort of object that fixes a place in the memory. Across the river, VISUAL is a large contemporary art building with free galleries and a theatre attached. Carlow Castle takes ten minutes: a surviving wall and two towers behind railings near the river, all that a doctor’s 1814 attempt to blast it into an asylum left standing. The Delta Sensory Gardens are a series of small linked gardens on the Strawhall estate, run by a charity, and Oak Park north of the town gives you flat lakeside forest trails when the Barrow is under water.

When to go

Almost everything worth seeing here is outdoors and free, which puts Carlow at its best between May and September, when the towpath is dry and the mountain road is open without drama. The paid attractions — Huntington Castle, Borris House — run summer seasons and shut for the winter, so a January visit is a walking visit. The Barrow floods after heavy rain and sections of towpath go soft; the forest tracks at Oak Park and Kilbrannish hold up better.