Chart Your Own Course
Curated driving tours across the O'Dubhda homelands — Sligo, Mayo, and beyond — each with a map, a route, and notes for the road.
Browse the Tours ↓Routes for the Curious Traveller
Each self-guided tour is a full Google Map with pins, a driving line, and notes at every stop — pick a day, pick a car, and drive the country yourself.
The O'Dubhda homelands are bigger than any single site. They are a country — coast, mound, river, market town, monastery, battle-field — laid down by centuries of living in one place. A self-guided tour is the simplest way to take some of it in: a loop of a day or a half-day, with the stops linked on a shared map, and a short note at each one so you know what you are looking at when you arrive.
Two tours are published for now, with more to follow. They can be driven in either order, at whatever pace suits you, and the maps will work on any phone with Google Maps installed.
The Tours
Two published routes — one literary, one historical — both curated for the Clan.
Walk Yeats Country
Drumcliffe Church, Lissadell House, Glencar Waterfall, and the Yeats statue on Hyde Bridge — a short drive through the landscape W. B. Yeats turned into verse, ending at his grave under Benbulben.
Start the Yeats Tour →In the Steps of the 1798 Rising
From the French landing at Kilcummin Head to the last stand at Ballinamuck — follow General Humbert's march across the west in the Year of the French, with stops at Killala, Castlebar, and the Ballinamuck visitor centre.
Start the 1798 Tour →How the Tours Work
Open the map. Each tour page has an embedded Google map, plus a button to open the map full-screen or on your phone. The driving lines and pins are already there — no separate GPX file needed.
Follow the stops in order. The tours are curated to be walked in a specific order, so that the narrative at each stop builds on the last. You can reverse a route, but the story flows best as-designed.
Take your time. The driving is the easy part. What takes time is standing in each place long enough for it to become something other than a photograph.
Send us a postcard. If you drive one of the tours and find something out of date — a visitor centre that closed, a memorial that moved, a detail we got wrong — please let us know. These tours live only as long as readers like you keep them current.
Curated by Andrew Dowds
The tours on this page — the routes, the selected stops, the maps, and the first draft of the notes at each location — were curated by Andrew Dowds, a previous Taoiseach of the O'Dubhda Clan. He walked and drove the ground himself on the Clan's behalf so that others could follow him.
We are grateful to him for them. Anyone who wants to add a tour of their own is warmly invited to get in touch — the road is wide, and this page has room for more.
Other Ways to Explore the Homelands
Landing pages across the Homelands section — each with its own map and cluster of places to visit.
A Note from the Clan
These tours are volunteer-authored — drawn from local knowledge, published histories, and miles on the clock. If you have a tour of your own in mind, or spot something we should fix, we want to hear from you.
Get in touch — the Clan travels best together.
