Hand-Picked Hotels & Apartments in Ireland

Few countries this compact take so long to cross, and in Ireland that is entirely the point. Turn off the main road on the Iveragh Peninsula and the Atlantic arrives without warning, all cliff and spray and enormous sky. Cities work the other way. Dublin and Galway pack their pubs, bookshops and music into a few walkable streets, so an afternoon of wandering turns into an evening you did not plan.

Our Irish list is short, and deliberately so. It runs from a hotel on Middle Abbey Street in the centre of Dublin and a family-run B&B in Tallaght on the city's south-western edge, to Kilkenny's medieval streets, a guest house on Newcastle Road in Galway city, and a community-run hostel at Killeenleagh in the Dromid Gaeltacht, deep on Kerry's Iveragh Peninsula. That is city breaks, a west-coast base and a properly rural bolthole. It is not a nationwide directory, and we would rather say so up front.