Things to do
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Bunratty Castle
A tower house of 1425 restored in the 1950s with a collection of medieval furnishings, beside a folk park of about thirty relocated buildings including a village street and working farmhouses. The medieval banquet in the great hall has run nightly since 1963.
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Craggaunowen
A living history site around a sixteenth-century tower house with a reconstructed crannog, a ring fort and a souterrain, and the leather boat Tim Severin sailed to Newfoundland in 1977 to test the Saint Brendan voyage. It is seasonal and closes in winter.
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Dromoland Castle
The ancestral seat of the O'Briens, direct descendants of Brian Boru, rebuilt in Gothic Revival style in the 1830s and run as a hotel since 1963, in a hundred and eighty hectares with a lake and a golf course. It is fifteen minutes from Shannon airport.
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Dysert O'Dea Castle
A tower house of 1480 with an archaeology centre, standing among the ruins of a monastery, a round tower stump and the twelfth-century White Cross of Tola in the fields around it. A marked trail links about twenty monuments in two kilometres.
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Ennis Friary
A Franciscan friary of about 1240 endowed by the O'Briens, holding the MacMahon tomb with its carved Passion panels, which is the finest late medieval sculpture in Ireland. It sits in the middle of the town and is roofed in part.