Historic Sites in County Monaghan

Three of the entries below sit within a few minutes’ walk of each other in Clones. A truncated round tower among the oldest in Ireland stands near a high cross assembled from the fragments of at least two 10th-century crosses and the ruins of the ‘Wee Abbey’; the Cassandra Hand Centre, in the 1859 school paid for by the lace industry she started during the Famine, and St Tiernach’s Church of Ireland are both a short walk from them. The restored Ulster Canal gives flat towpath walking from the same town.

Monaghan town holds two more. St Macartan’s Cathedral crowns the Hill of the Monks above the town, the only cathedral in the county, with a hammerbeam roof and a 2,000-pipe organ inside. Down in Church Square, the 1827–30 courthouse still carries bullet marks from the Civil War on its Doric columns, and the memorial to the seven people killed in the 1974 bombing stands outside it.

The rest need a drive. Carrickmacross has the 1841 workhouse, now a community centre with weekday guided tours, and the roofless Magheross Church in a working graveyard on the town’s edge. Clontibret and the cairn on Mullyash Mountain are linked by the Monaghan Way, a half-day walk between them. Hollywood Lake, free to enter since 1969, is the summer stop, with swimming and a MacMahon crannog out in the water.