The Wild Atlantic Way in 7 Days

Most Wild Atlantic Way itineraries waste their first day driving out of Dublin. Fly into Shannon instead if the routes work for you. It is ninety minutes from Galway rather than three hours, and it puts you on the coast by lunchtime on day one.

Galway is small enough to walk in an afternoon and dense enough that you never quite finish it. Start at the Spanish Arch, work up Quay Street while the buskers are still setting up, and let the Latin Quarter take care of the rest. If you are here on a Saturday, the market behind St Nicholas' Church is the one fixed point worth planning around.

Do not try to add Connemara today. You will have been travelling since dawn, the light will be going, and Connemara is worth more than a tired drive-through. Eat early, find a session at Tigh Neachtain or The Crane, and go to bed. Tomorrow is the long one.

The N59 out of Galway turns from ordinary to extraordinary somewhere around Maam Cross. By Recess you are among the Twelve Bens with bog stretching out on both sides in colours that never photograph properly: rust, ochre, black water.

Kylemore Abbey is the picture you have already seen, a Victorian castle mirrored in a lake under a mountain. It is lovely and it is busy. Go early or go late, and walk the mile up to the walled garden, where the coaches tend not to bother.

Push on to Clifden for the Sky Road, a nine-kilometre loop with views out over the islands that costs nothing and takes forty minutes. This is usually the point where people decide the trip has started.

Back in Galway for dinner. It is about 200 km round trip, but plan for six hours rather than three. The roads are single carriageway and you will keep pulling over.

The best advice in this itinerary is one sentence long. Take the boat from Doolin.

Almost everyone drives to the visitor centre, walks the fenced path, looks down and leaves. From the water you look up at 214 metres of black shale with puffins coming off it, and you see the sea stack and the caves that are invisible from the top. It costs roughly what the car park and a coffee cost.

Get there through the Burren on the R477 Coast Road. It is a limestone moonscape that feels like driving on a different planet, and Poulnabrone dolmen sits right beside the road, 5,800 years old and free to walk up to.

If the boat is cancelled, and in this weather it can be, the cliff walk from Doolin to Hag's Head is a good consolation. Sleep in Doolin itself: three pubs, three sessions, no need to drive anywhere.

Take the Killimer to Tarbert ferry across the Shannon. It saves about two hours of driving inland through Limerick and costs around €22 for a car, which makes it the easiest good decision of the week. Sailings are hourly and you cannot book, so turn up and join the queue.

With a spare morning, detour to Loop Head first. It is the stretch of the Wild Atlantic Way that tour buses cannot reach, and on a clear day the lighthouse peninsula holds its own against Moher with a fraction of the people.

South of the ferry the country softens into farmland, then rears up again at the Conor Pass, the highest road in Ireland. It is single track in places with a drop on one side and a rock wall on the other. If that sounds like more than you want, the N86 gets you into Dingle without the drama.

Dingle town is a working fishing port that happens to have very good food and more pubs than its population justifies.

The Slea Head Drive is a 47 km loop and it deserves a whole day rather than a morning. Drive it clockwise. The coaches go anticlockwise, and if you get it wrong you will spend the day reversing into gateways to let them past.

Stop at the beehive huts, at Dunbeg fort, and at the Gallarus Oratory, a dry stone chapel that has kept the rain out for twelve hundred years without a drop of mortar. Then at Slea Head itself, where the land stops and the Blasket Islands sit out in the swell. People lived out there until 1953, and the visitor centre at Dunquin tells that story better than it needs to.

This is the westernmost inhabited point of the country and one of the strongest Gaeltacht areas left. The road signs stop being bilingual and the radio changes language.

Back to Dingle for the evening. If the day has been kind, walk out to the lighthouse at dusk.

The Ring of Kerry has a reputation as a coach conveyor belt, and on the standard anticlockwise circuit out of Killarney it earns that reputation. Do the opposite. Go clockwise from Kenmare and you meet the buses head-on for a second at a time instead of sitting behind them all day.

Start in Killarney National Park early, at Torc Waterfall and Muckross House before nine, while the jaunting cars are still hitching up. Then over Moll's Gap, where the road climbs into the Macgillycuddy's Reeks and the whole valley opens underneath you.

Skip Waterville's main street and take the Skellig Ring instead. It is a narrow detour that most coaches physically cannot manage, running past Ballinskelligs and over the Coomanaspig Pass to Portmagee, with the Skelligs sitting out on the horizon.

End the day in Kenmare rather than Killarney. Better food, half the crowds, and it sets you up for the Beara Peninsula if you have an extra day to spare.

Skellig Michael is the reason to keep day seven flexible. It is a sixth-century monastery on a pyramid of rock twelve kilometres out in the Atlantic, reached by 618 stone steps with nothing to hold on to. Landing permits are capped at about 180 people a day, the season runs from mid-May to the end of September, and roughly one trip in three is cancelled by swell.

Book the landing tour months ahead and treat it as a lottery ticket. If it sails, it will be the thing you remember from the whole trip. If it does not, the eco tour circles both islands without landing and still gets you close enough to hear the gannet colony on Little Skellig. There are 70,000 birds on that rock and you smell it before you see it.

The weather-beaten plan B is the Kerry Cliffs at Portmagee, ten minutes away, which are arguably a better cliff view than Moher.

Fly out of Kerry or Cork rather than driving back to Dublin. It saves a wasted final day, and this trip deserves to end on the coast.