Things to Do in County Laois

More about County Laois

Where to base yourself

Portlaoise is the practical base rather than the pretty one: it sits on the M7 and on the Dublin–Cork railway, about an hour from Heuston, and nothing in the county is more than forty minutes’ drive from it. It has the chain hotels, the supermarkets and the late petrol station, which matters more than it sounds in a county this rural.

For somewhere nicer to sleep, go south. Durrow has a proper Georgian green with pubs on three sides, and Castle Durrow — a 1716 house turned country hotel — on the fourth. Abbeyleix is the other good option, and both are on the old Dublin–Cork road with plenty of food. If the mountains are the plan, Mountrath and Clonaslee put you at the foot of them, though you are into B&Bs and self-catering rather than hotels.

One date rules everything: Stradbally hosts Electric Picnic over a weekend in late August or early September, and when it does, every bed within thirty miles — Portlaoise, Athy, Carlow, half of Kildare — is gone months in advance at several times the usual rate. The Stradbally steam rally over the August bank holiday does a milder version of the same thing. Check the festival dates before you book anything.

Into the Slieve Blooms

The Slieve Blooms are old, rounded and low — Arderin, the high point on the Laois–Offaly border, is 527 m — which makes them forgiving hills to walk. There is no scrambling and no exposure; there is a lot of blanket bog, forestry track and, in poor visibility, very little to navigate by, so carry a map. The Slieve Bloom Way runs roughly 70 km as a full circuit, but most people do one of the signposted loops from Clonaslee, Rosenallis or the Ridge of Capard car park, where a short boardwalk gets you a view over the whole midland plain for very little effort.

Lower down, Cullenagh Mountain gives a modest half-day walk south-east of Portlaoise, and Oughaval Wood near Stradbally holds a famine-relief folly and a Mass rock under mature beech. On the county’s eastern edge the Barrow Way follows the towpath of the River Barrow — flat, green, and the easiest walking in Laois, with lock-keepers’ cottages and not much traffic.

Gardens, and the Lutyens one

Heywood Gardens at Ballinakill, south of Abbeyleix, is the county’s quiet triumph: a formal garden designed by Edwin Lutyens between 1909 and 1912, with planting attributed to Gertrude Jekyll — a sunken oval terrace, a pool with bronze turtles, and long views out over borrowed countryside. The big house burned and is gone; the garden survived and is now in state care, free, and open every day. It sits in the grounds of a working school, so expect a shared car park in term time.

Emo Court is the grander sibling and the parkland is free to walk year-round even when the house tours are not running. Beyond those two, Laois has an unusual number of small private gardens open in season: Gash Gardens outside Castletown runs down to the Nore with a rock garden built by its owner, and Ballintubbert, the birthplace of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, is laid out as organic garden rooms. Both keep short seasons — ring ahead.

Round towers, abbeys and a rock

Laois was Osraige border country and it kept the ruins to prove it. Timahoe has the best of them: a round tower of around 1100, some 30 m tall and leaning slightly, with a Romanesque doorway carved with bearded heads that is the finest of its kind on any Irish tower. It stands in a field off the village green, free and open at all hours, and the esker beside it is thick with bluebells in late April.

Aghaboe Abbey was St Canice’s monastery before Kilkenny got the name, and what survives is a Dominican friary and a later church on the same ground. Clonenagh is barely a ruin at all but the roadside sycamore near it, with water pooling in a hollow of the trunk, still gets coins pushed into it. The Rock of Dunamase is the one everyone stops for — a Norman castle blown up in 1650, standing on a crag over the plain, unfenced, unstaffed and free, with the Slieve Blooms on one horizon and Wicklow on the other. Wear proper shoes; the rock is uneven and it gets slick. The Laois Monastic Trail strings the sites together if you want a route rather than a list.

Towns, mills and wet afternoons

Mountmellick was a Quaker town and an industrial one — “Ireland’s little Manchester” — and its heritage museum keeps the white-on-white embroidery the town gave its name to. Portarlington was settled by Huguenots and still has the French church and a July festival to mark it. The Donaghmore Famine Workhouse near Rathdowney is the county’s most affecting indoor hour: an 1850s workhouse kept largely as it was, with an agricultural museum attached, run by volunteers on limited hours. Stradbally Hall runs a narrow-gauge steam railway through its grounds on selected dates, which is the best wet-weather bribe in the county if you have children with you.