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Sunday 15 – Tuesday 17 September 2019.

3 day/2-night tour of Sligo, Longford, Roscommon & the North West

(Fully booked but if you wish to go on the waiting list contact Maria on 087 2884069)

Cost: €260.00 per person sharing a twin/double room, €320.00 for single rooms. 

Hotel: 4-star Sligo Park Hotel, Sligo. – 2 nights dinner, bed & breakfast.

Based on 30 travelling, places are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

Guided Tours of the following:

• Corlea Trackway Visitors Centre –  interprets an Iron Age bog road that was built in 148 BC across the bog lands of Longford. Inside the centre an eighteen-metre stretch of the preserved trackway is on display.

• St. Mel’s Cathedral, Longford – the foundation stone laid in 1840 but did not open until 1856 due to the famine. There are beautiful stained-glass windows by artist Harry Clarke at the end of the side chapel.

• Castlecoote House – a magnificent Georgian building incorporating parts of a sixteenth-century castle. The present owners bought Castlecoote House in 1997, the house was a ruin and the restoration took 5 years.

• Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery – the largest cemetery of megalithic tombs in Ireland and is also among the country’s oldest with monuments ranging from 5,000 to 5,800 years old.

• Lissadell House is a Neo-Classical Greek Revival style house built of local cut grey limestone designed by Francis Goodwin. It is famous as the childhood home of Constance Markievicz, her sister Eva Gore-Booth and her brother Josslyn Gore-Booth.

• Belleek Pottery & Museum – see the Masterpiece Collection Laurel Basket being made by talented craftspeople. Also, the museum contains pieces dating back to when the pottery was started in 1857.

• Mullaghmore Harbour – short stop here.

• Drumcliffe Church & Cemetery – located in an area of outstanding natural beauty in north county Sligo and has connections with Saint Columba, W.B. Yeats and the Gore-Booth family.

• Sligo Abbey – a Dominican Friary founded in the mid-thirteenth-century by Maurice Fitzgerald. The site contains a great wealth of carvings including Gothic and Renaissance tomb sculpture, a well-preserved cloister and the only sculptured fifteenth-century high alter to survive in an Irish monastic church.

• Parke’s Castle – a restored plantation castle of the early seventeenth-century, situated on the shores of Lough Gill, once the home of Robert Parke. There is evidence of an earlier sixteenth-century Tower House once owned by Brian O’Rourke who was executed in Tyburn, London in 1591.

• Florence Court – a Georgian mansion and Irish estate which is the creation of three successive generations of the Cole family who were powerful Fermanagh landowners in the plantations of the seventeenth-century.

• Light Lunches: Day 1 Longford TBC, Day 2 Tea Rooms, Lissadell House, Day 3 Stables Restaurant, Florence Court