New book names Offaly as the best county for nature walking

The author of a new book on the controversial topic of access to the Irish countryside says that Offaly was the highlight of his 678km walk across Ireland, and that the county is one of the best places for walking in the country.

The Pathless Land: Finding a Way Across Ireland is the latest publication from award-winning travel writer Tim Hannigan, who lives in East Galway. The book is an account of a walk from the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry to Burr Point in Co. Down and an exploration of the history of land access and ownership in Ireland, which the author hopes will prompt conversations about extending public rights to walk across the land.

“The starting point for this book was a simple question: why does Ireland have probably the most limited public access to the countryside in the whole of Europe – and does it have to be like this?” says Hannigan, who teaches Writing and Literature at ATU Sligo. “I set out to walk from one end of the country to the other to try to come up with some answers.”

The journey – undertaken in the summer of 2024 – was a challenging one, he says, during which he tried to avoid both deliberate trespass and walking on roads. But the lack of public footpaths often made that impossible.

“Ireland is an outlier in Europe,” says Hannigan. “Whether it’s the allemansrätten in Scandinavia or the public footpaths in France and England, most other European countries have a proper system of access. But there is virtually no statutory mechanism here to guarantee a public right to walk in the Irish landscape beyond the roads.”

But Offaly, he says, was a positive exception. “When people think of destinations for walking in Ireland, it’s probably places like Kerry that immediately come to mind. But I’d recommend Offaly. During the walk for the book, I was able to get across almost the whole of Offaly without walking on roads. There was no other county where I could do that. I followed the Grand Canal towpath from Shannon Harbour and then after Tullamore I branched away on the old Kilbeggan line.”

Hannigan says that more generally, Offaly is a place with an unusual level of public access to the countryside: “As well as the canal, there are brilliant trails in Slieve Bloom, and the bogs provide great access to open country too. One of the absolute highlights of the journey was a beautiful summer evening, wild camping on the bog at Pollagh. I’d say Offaly could be the best place in Ireland for accessing nature and the landscape on foot.”

The Pathless Land was published by Head of Zeus in September, and has already received significant media attention. Philip Boucher-Hayes of RTÉ describes the book as “A brilliant read, full of history, local curiosity and characters”, and says of Hannigan – who grew up in Cornwall but is a longtime Galway resident – that “he’s here long enough to know us well, but he’s also detached enough to look at Ireland and our ideas about the land with a dispassionate eye”.

For Hannigan – who is a committee member of Keep Ireland Open, the voluntary organisation that has campaigned on access issues for decades – that outside perspective is what makes the issue so obvious. “I’m always meeting people from other parts of Europe – Austria, Germany, Italy, England – who are shocked by the lack of public countryside access here. And I’m also always meeting Irish people who’ve lived in those places and were amazed by how much freedom they had to connect with nature and move across the land.”

Hannigan claims that better countryside access would not only bring people closer to nature and boost tourism; it would potentially reduce conflict over cycling and walking routes. “There’s been a lot of controversy around greenways in recent years, and that’s actually a result of the lack of access legislation in Ireland. In other countries they don’t need to spend vast amounts of money or issue compulsory purchase orders to create a new offroad route across the countryside; they can just signpost a new footpath.”

He acknowledges the historical sensitivities around land ownership, but points out that public footpaths across farmland used to exist in Ireland and are clearly recorded on old maps from the early twentieth century. “Any legislative change would have to be slow and sensitively handled. A proper conversation about it and a bit of historical reflection is where we need to begin. I’m hoping the book will encourage that.”