EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

From Clonmacnois, the road south skirts the Boora Bog to SHANNONBRIDGE . The road leading into the tiny village has a set of traffic lights where it meets the Shannon, as the narrow sixteen-span bridge can only accommodate single lane traffic. Upstream, the wetlands of the Shannon open up; downstream a power station signifies the exploitation of the boglands. This is the point where counties Offaly, Roscommon and Galway meet and the River Suck joins the Shannon: hence the strategically placed and massive artillery fortification dating from Napoleonic times. There are a couple of B&Bs here, including Racha House right in the middle of the village (tel 0905/74249; £33-40/41.90-50.79); and Laurel Lodge (tel 0905/74189; £33-40/41.90-50.79), a mile out of town towards Banagher, both of which rent out bikes and boats. The Shannonside Diner does snacks and light meals ; there's a music pub - Killeen's Tavern - on the main street.

Just outside the town on the Tullamore Road (the R357), at the Irish Peat Board, Bord na Mona's Blackwater power-generating plant, you can join a tour that explores the bog on the Clonmacnois and West Offaly Railway , which will take you on a five-mile circular tour on narrow gauge through the Blackwater Bog. Unlike Clara Bog Blackwater Bog is being exploited hell-for-leather; you can't miss the power station with its thin chimneys belching brown smoke into the air. The irony of touring the bog under the auspices of the organization that's itself helping to destroy it won't be lost on anyone "A few hundred years from now", says the publicity material, suavely, the bog "will be an integrated tapestry of fields, woodlands and wetlands. The landscape never stands still." The tour, which lasts some 45 minutes, leaves every hour on the hour (April-Oct daily 10am-5pm; £3/3.81) and is preceded by a 35-minute video on the flora and fauna you're about to see.

Also nearby, and of particular interest if you have children to entertain, is the Ashbrook Open Farm and Agricultural Museum (April-Sept daily 10am-7pm; £2/2.54), with plenty of farm animals, donkeys, rare birds and farm implements.

About five miles further south (take the R357 and turn at Clonony), Shannon Harbour is where the River Brosna and the Grand Canal meet the Shannon after their journey right across Ireland. As you walk down to the junction, there comes a beautiful point where the entire landscape seems to become water. Clonony Castle , a mile or two further inland, is a ruined sixteenth-century tower house with a nineteenth-century reconstructed barn - to the side of which are buried Anne Boleyn's sisters, Elizabeth and Mary - and which was extensively restored in the seventeenth century by an entrepreneurial German, Matthew de Renzi.