Scenic Routes

Scenic is the largest theme on the site, and deliberately so. Ireland is small enough that the difference between the fast road and the beautiful one is usually twenty minutes, which means you can build an entire trip out of the beautiful ones without ever feeling like you are going out of your way.

What Makes a Drive Scenic Here

Ireland does not have alpine drama. What it has instead is variety at close range — you can go from limestone pavement to Atlantic cliff to oak woodland inside an hour. The routes tagged scenic are the ones where the view through the windscreen is the reason to drive, rather than a bonus on the way somewhere.

Three kinds of scenery recur:

• Coast roads — the Wild Atlantic Way sections, the Antrim coast, the Copper Coast in Waterford
• Mountain passes — Moll's Gap, the Gap of Mamore, Barnes Gap, the Sally Gap
• Lake and river valleys — the Shannon, Lough Derg, the Barrow, the Erne lakelands

Driving Them Well

Scenic and easy are not the same thing. Many of the best views in Ireland sit at the top of a single-track road with grass growing down the middle and a blind bend every hundred metres. Nothing on this site is beyond a standard hire car, but a few habits help:

• Use the pull-ins. Stopping on the road itself to take a photograph is the single most common cause of friction with locals, who are usually trying to get to work.
• Give yourself the daylight. Our realistic times assume you stop. In November that can mean the last hour of a route happens in the dark, which defeats the point.
• Reverse before you need to. On single-track roads the car nearer a passing place backs up. Knowing where the last one was makes this painless.

The driving rules guide covers speed limits and signage, and if this is your first time on the left, read which side of the road Ireland drives on before you collect the car.

When to Go

Scenic routes are the most weather-dependent thing on the site. A mountain pass in cloud is just a road. That said, Irish weather rarely commits to anything for a full day, so the practical advice is to drive the route anyway and build in enough time to wait out a shower at a viewpoint.

Late May to early June and all of September are the sweet spots — long days, thinner traffic than July and August, and the light that makes the west coast worth the trip. Spring and autumn both have their own guides.