The Most Beautiful Places in Ireland
15 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Ireland are Rock of Cashel, Poulnabrone dolmen and Kylemore Abbey. The list covers 15 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Ireland's beauty comes from the meeting of hard rock and Atlantic weather. Ice-age glaciers scoured the west into bare limestone, granite valleys and flat-topped mountains, and the ocean cut the edge of the island into some of the highest sea cliffs in Europe. Into that landscape people placed monuments for five thousand years: Neolithic tombs, Iron Age stone forts, early Christian monasteries on islands and in valleys, and medieval churches on rocky hills. Because the land was farmed lightly and rarely built over, much of this survives in the open, against the sky.
Newgrange in the Boyne Valley is a passage tomb older than the pyramids of Giza, and on the winter solstice the rising sun shines down its passage into the inner chamber. In the Burren, the Poulnabrone dolmen balances a capstone on upright slabs above bare limestone pavement. Dún Aonghasa on Inishmore is a ring of drystone walls set right on the edge of a sheer cliff, and the Grianán of Aileach in Donegal is a circular stone fort on a hilltop.
The monastic tradition gives Ireland some of its most memorable places. Skellig Michael holds the beehive huts of monks on a steep rock far out in the Atlantic; Glendalough, founded by St Kevin, keeps its round tower in a glacial valley; and the Rock of Cashel, once the seat of the kings of Munster, crowns a limestone outcrop with a cathedral and Cormac's Chapel. Along the coast, the Cliffs of Moher and Slieve League show the Atlantic edge at full height, and Ben Bulben's flat-topped ridge rises over Sligo.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rock of Cashel | Archaeological site | |
| 2 | Poulnabrone dolmen | Dolmen | |
| 3 | Kylemore Abbey | Abbey | |
| 4 | Newgrange | Tumulus | ✓ |
| 5 | Cliffs of Moher | Cliff | |
| 6 | Dún Aonghasa | Hillfort | |
| 7 | Glendalough | Abbey | |
| 8 | Skellig Michael | Island | ✓ |
| 9 | Ben Bulben | Mountain | |
| 10 | Grianán of Aileach | Hillfort | |
| 11 | Powerscourt Estate | Manor house | |
| 12 | Slieve League | Cliff | |
| 13 | Dún Briste | Stack | |
| 14 | Old Library, Trinity College Dublin | Library building | |
| 15 | Fanad Head Lighthouse | Lighthouse |
01 Rock of Cashel
Ireland52.520° N 7.890° W
Image by KWHacbc from Pixabay The Rock of Cashel rises abruptly out of the flat farmland of County Tipperary, a limestone outcrop crowned with a ruined cathedral, a round tower and a small Romanesque chapel, all packed together within a single wall.
Did you know? That sarcophagus is considered the oldest of only about 17 medieval sarcophagi identified in Ireland.
02 Poulnabrone dolmen
Ireland · 25.6 km from Galway53.049° N 9.140° W
PaulT · CC BY-SA 4.0 Poulnabrone is a portal tomb standing alone on the bare limestone of the Burren in County Clare — a thin, tilted capstone balanced on slender uprights, framed by grey pavement cut into blocks by deep fissures. 8 metres tall. Around it is the remnant of a low cairn about ten metres across.
Did you know? One man's skull bears a healed wound probably made by a sling stone, and another person's hip still holds the tip of a stone projectile.
03 Kylemore Abbey
Ireland53.562° N 9.889° W
Image by uncutURBEX from Pixabay Kylemore is the odd one in this list: not a medieval foundation but a Victorian country house that became a monastery by accident of war.
Did you know? Some forty gardeners worked the six-acre walled garden at its peak, and contemporaries compared it with Kew Gardens in London.
04 Newgrange
Ireland · 8.4 km from Drogheda53.695° N 6.476° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by fsHH from Pixabay Newgrange is a Neolithic passage tomb on a rise above the River Boyne in County Meath, built around 3100 BC, several centuries before the Great Pyramid and the stone circle at Stonehenge.
Did you know? None of the 547 great slabs were quarried: they are naturally weathered stones collected and hauled, largely uphill, to the site.
05 Cliffs of Moher
Ireland52.936° N 9.471° W
Image by Ieva_K from Pixabay The Cliffs of Moher are a 14 km wall of dark rock along the Atlantic coast of County Clare, at the south-western edge of the Burren. At their southern end, at Hag's Head, they rise 120 m above the sea; eight kilometres north, just beyond O'Brien's Tower, they reach 214 m before falling away again towards Doolin.
Did you know? According to legend, the sea-witch Mal chased the hero Cú Chulainn here; he leapt across the sea stacks, but she fell to her death on the rocks.
06 Dún Aonghasa
Dun Aengus
Ireland53.126° N 9.766° W
Fried Marek · CC BY 4.0 Dún Aonghasa sits on the very lip of the Atlantic, on the southern cliffs of Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands. The cliff below it drops close to ninety metres straight into the ocean, and the fort's innermost enclosure is a semicircle that simply stops at the edge, as if the sea had taken the rest.
Did you know? In 1839 a bronze brooch of the early Iron Age, a fibula with a bird's-head design, was found tucked inside one of the walls.
07 Glendalough
Ireland · 37.7 km from Dublin53.010° N 6.327° W
Image by desimaxwell from Pixabay Glendalough is where St Kevin withdrew into the Wicklow Mountains in the sixth century, and where the hermitage he started grew into one of the great monastic settlements of early medieval Ireland.
Did you know? The Book of Glendalough, a major medieval Irish manuscript, was written here around 1131.
08 Skellig Michael
Ireland51.771° N 10.541° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by NakNakNak from Pixabay Around the 6th century, a small group of monks chose the more punishing of Ireland's two available forms of isolation.
Did you know? Some 600 stone steps laid by the monks climb from the sea to the monastery perched around 180 metres up.
09 Ben Bulben
Ireland · 11.1 km from Sligo54.367° N 8.467° W
Hellowiki789 · CC BY-SA 3.0 Ben Bulben looks less like a mountain than a ship run aground on the plain of north Sligo: a long, flat-topped table of rock, 526 metres high, its sides falling in steep cliffs towards the coastal plain and the Atlantic. Its shape is the work of the last Ice Age.
Did you know? A rhyme recorded by Yeats in The Celtic Twilight credits Ben Bulben and nearby Knocknarea with saving many sailors from shipwreck.
10 Grianán of Aileach
Grianan of Aileach
Ireland · 6.7 km from Londonderry/Derry55.017° N 7.433° W
Gareth Wray · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Grianán of Aileach sits on the top of Greenan Mountain, only 244 metres high but placed so that it commands the land between Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle, and on a clear day the view takes in parts of Donegal, Londonderry and Tyrone.
Did you know? The longest passage hidden inside the wall runs for about 20 metres.
11 Powerscourt Estate
Ireland · 18.6 km from Dublin53.185° N 6.187° W
Amanda Susan Munroe · CC BY-SA 3.0 Powerscourt is less a house than a stage set on which a house happens to stand.
Did you know? Richard Cassels's Palladian rebuilding of the old castle took about a decade, from 1731 to 1741.
12 Slieve League
Ireland54.638° N 8.681° W
Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States · CC BY 2.0 Slieve League, Sliabh Liag in Irish, is a mountain on the south-west coast of County Donegal whose seaward side falls to the Atlantic in some of the highest sea cliffs in Europe.
Did you know? Most of the cliff is ancient Dalradian quartzite and gneiss, while the summit is capped by a thin layer of much younger Carboniferous sandstone and conglomerate.
13 Dún Briste
Dun Briste
Ireland54.328° N 9.348° W
Bargode · CC BY-SA 4.0 Dún Briste, the "broken fort", is a sea stack standing about 200 metres off the tip of Downpatrick Head on the north coast of County Mayo.
Did you know? The 1980 landing party included the archaeologist Seamus Caulfield, best known for his work on the Neolithic Céide Fields along the same coast.
14 Old Library, Trinity College Dublin
The Old Library
Ireland · 0.3 km from Dublin53.344° N 6.257° W
Diliff · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Old Library of Trinity College Dublin was built between 1712 and 1732 to designs by Thomas Burgh, surveyor-general of Ireland, and it still sits among the university's squares in the middle of the city.
Did you know? The upper storeys were first faced in white St Bees sandstone from Cumbria, which weathered badly and was later replaced by Wicklow granite.
15 Fanad Head Lighthouse
Fanad Head Light
Ireland · 36.1 km from Londonderry/Derry55.276° N 7.632° W
Andreas F. Borchert · CC BY-SA 4.0 Fanad Head Light stands at the tip of the Fanad peninsula in County Donegal, on a low headland where the mouth of Lough Swilly opens onto the Atlantic.
Did you know? Divers later recovered the vast majority of the Laurentic's 3,211 gold bars from the wreck near Fanad Head.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Ireland?
- On our list, Rock of Cashel ranks first, followed by Poulnabrone dolmen and Kylemore Abbey.
- How old is Newgrange?
- Newgrange was built around 3200 BC, in the Neolithic period, which makes it older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza. It is part of the Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site in County Meath.
- Where was Star Wars filmed in Ireland?
- Skellig Michael, a rocky island off the coast of County Kerry, appears as Luke Skywalker's refuge in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. The island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its early medieval monastery of stone beehive huts.
- What is the Rock of Cashel?
- The Rock of Cashel is a limestone outcrop in County Tipperary that was the seat of the kings of Munster before it was granted to the Church in 1101. It carries a round tower, a Gothic cathedral and Cormac's Chapel, one of the finest Romanesque buildings in Ireland.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Ireland?
- In our collection, the places in Ireland are most often cliffs (2), monasteries (2), abbeys (2) and hillforts (2).
- How many places are on this list in Ireland?
- The list covers 15 places.