Things to Do in County Roscommon

More about County Roscommon

Where to base yourself

Boyle is the base most visitors want. It’s the prettiest town in the county, sits at the foot of the Curlews with the abbey and King House inside it, and Lough Key is two minutes down the road — which means you can do the northern half of Roscommon without getting back into the car much. Roscommon town is the bigger, more practical option in the middle of the county: hotels, a retail park, the castle in a public park, and roughly an hour from anywhere in Roscommon. Strokestown is small but well placed for Rathcroghan and the Famine sites, and Castlerea covers the west. On the Shannon, Tarmonbarry is a lock-side village that suits anyone arriving by boat.

Bed supply is thin, and it goes in bursts rather than steadily. Boyle fills for the Arts Festival in July and for the Boyle Arts and Gathering weekends; Roscommon town fills whenever the county football team is at home and for the Rose weekend in August. Athlone and Carrick-on-Shannon, both just outside the county, are the fallback if Roscommon itself is full — Carrick is fifteen minutes from Boyle.

Boyle, Lough Key and the Curlews

Lough Key Forest Park is the county’s one big day-out, and it’s better than the phrase “forest park” suggests. There’s a tree canopy walk on raised gangways, a network of underground servants’ tunnels left over from Rockingham House — the mansion that burned in 1957 — and Boda Borg, an indoor puzzle-room complex that is genuinely the best rainy-day option for anyone over about eight. Moylurg Tower, the concrete lookout that stands where the house did, is an ugly building with a very good view over the lake and its islands. Parking is pay-and-display and the park is open all year; the individual attractions have their own seasons and tickets.

In Boyle itself, King House is a 1730s mansion built by the King family and later a barracks for the Connaught Rangers, now a museum with a decent Connacht history section. The Shannon-Boyle waterway links the town to Lough Key through a lock, and short cruises run in summer. North of town the N4 climbs the Curlew Mountains, where Red Hugh O’Donnell’s men broke an English army in August 1599; Maurice Harron’s steel Gaelic Chieftain sculpture marks the pass and there’s a lay-by to pull into.

Rathcroghan and the older landscape

Rathcroghan is not a single monument but roughly 6 square kilometres of field containing over 200 recorded sites — mounds, barrows, ring forts and linear earthworks — the royal complex of Connacht and the setting of the Táin. Most of it is on working farmland, and the point of the visitor centre at Tulsk is that it gets you onto the ground legitimately with someone who can read it. Access to the cave in particular is by guided tour only: it is a low, wet, pitch-black crawl through a souterrain, not a walk-in, and you will get filthy.

Elsewhere the county’s early stone is scattered and mostly free. The Castlestrange Stone near Athleague is a granite boulder carved in flowing La Tène spirals over two thousand years ago, standing in a demesne with no ticket and no crowd. Lough Gara gave up more than three hundred crannógs when its level was lowered in the 1950s — the densest concentration of lake dwellings found in Ireland. Ballintober Castle is a huge 13th-century O’Conor quadrangle with towers at each corner and no keep at all, roofless and open to the field.

The Famine

Roscommon lost more of its population in the Famine than almost any other county, and Strokestown Park House is where the story is told properly. The Palladian house survives with its original contents, and the estate archive — found intact in the 1990s — documents what its landlord, Major Denis Mahon, did to his tenants and what happened to him afterwards; he was shot dead in 1847. The National Famine Way traces the 165 km walked by 1,490 evicted tenants from the gates of Strokestown to the Dublin quays, marked along the towpaths by bronze children’s shoes. You can walk a stage of it in an afternoon rather than committing to the whole route.

Walking, water and wet days

The Suck Valley Way follows a slow, reedy river through the south of the county and is good for birds and quiet rather than for views. The Miners Way climbs into the old coal country above Arigna and links up with the mine tour. The greenway at Ballyforan runs across restored bog and is flat, surfaced and short enough for children.

When it rains, Roscommon County Museum in a former Presbyterian church in the county town is small, free and has a good sheela-na-gig and medieval carvings. The Douglas Hyde Centre at Frenchpark, in the church where his father was rector, covers the Gaelic League founder who became Ireland’s first President in 1938. And Elphin has its restored tower mill, which turns when there’s wind and is worth timing a visit around.