Ed Power veers off the well-worn tourist trail, and looks at how three lesser known counties succeed in attracting visitors
Ireland, according to the promotional spiel, is waiting to be discovered. Evidently some parts are expected to wait longer than others.
One of the ironies of our recently cultivated taste for exotic travel is that while we all know someone who has been to Vietnam, Patagonia or Karachi, vast swathes of Ireland remain largely unexplored even by domestic holiday makers.
Yet in their way, "unglamorous" counties such as Longford or Leitrim are no less steeped in charm than Ireland's A-list attractions.
In fact, they arguably offer an additional point of appeal - the thrill of the unknown.
Longford, for example, boasts one of Europe's best preserved pre-Roman roadways and Leitrim is home to a Wild West theme park. Unfashionable Carlow, meanwhile, has become Ireland's hang-gliding capital .
All three are counties where tourism has pulled itself up by the bootstraps. Although many regions have reported a dip in visitor numbers, Longford, Carlow and Leitrim have actually witnessed a tourism boom of late. Key to their success has been a determination to exploit the very qualities - perceived remoteness, the unhurried pace of life - that in the past doomed them to peripheral status.
"When I took the job someone said it was a good thing I like a challenge because selling Longford to the world certainly sounds like one," laughs Maura Flynn, marketing executive with the county's tourism board.
Yet, to her surprise, she discovered the county spilling over with attractions. Pre-eminent among them is Corlea Trackway, one of the oldest Iron age "roads" in Europe. Discovered in a peat bog in 1984, the archaeological significance of the trackway (located 10 km from Longford town on the Ballymahon road) was formally acknowledged in 1994, when an exhibition centre opened there. It has since emerged as one of the midlands' focal tourist destinations.
The county can also claim a hint of the surreal in the form of Ardagh village, extensively rebuilt in the style of a Swiss mountain hamlet during the 19th century. The project was then a hobby horse of the local landlords, the Fetherstons, who commissioned Victorian architect John Rawson Carroll to redesign Ardagh.
The result was an architectural oddity, an Alpine wonderland sitting full square in the Irish boglands.
If Longford has had to overcome an image problem - the incorrect perception that it embodies some notional midlands "blandness" - then nearby Carlow has been forced to deal with a similar problem. Often it seems as if the rest of the country simply hasn't taken the time to notice that Carlow exists as a tourist destination.
Recently Carlow has made inroads in its struggle against obscurity, says Carlow Tourism chief executive Eileen O'Rourke. As with Longford, the county is being marketed as an unspoiled secret, a Utopian retreat for jaundiced urbanites. It can draw on one of Ireland's foremost collections of megalithic artefacts to attract people. Brownshill Dolmen (2 km from Carlow town), Europe's largest portal dolmen, is one of 800 field monuments throughout the county.
And Carlow may plausibly style itself as the birthplace of Easter. It was at the ecclesiastical site of Old Leighlin (off the main Carlow to Kilkenny Road) that the date for Christianity's greatest feast day was determined at a synod in AD 630.
Adventure holidays are regarded as increasingly vital to Carlow tourism. Mount Leinster, on the border with Wexford, is Ireland's pre-eminent hang-gliding location, attracting enthusiasts from all around the country. The hope is that other lovers of the outdoors will be wooed by Carlow's open vistas and pristine scenery.
"Angling has always been one of the main tourist activities but we have been trying to attract a broader range of visitor," says Ms O'Rourke.
"The fact that Carlow is so unspoiled is one of the qualities we have attempted to emphasise. The great outdoors doesn't come any greater."
Of all Ireland's counties, none has arguably had to fight harder to assert its identity as a tourist destination than Leitrim. Overshadowed by Connemara, the Galway Gaeltacht, and Sligo's Yeats Country, our least populous county has sought to brand itself as a glimpse of the "real" Ireland.
"A lot of the tourists we get tell us they want to see another side of the country. They've done the traditional tourist things - the Ring of Kerry, the Connemara Gaeltacht. Now they want to have a look at a different, perhaps less commercialised, aspect of Ireland," says Sinéad McDermott, tourism development officer with Leitrim County Council.
As with Longford and Carlow, angling has always been a traditional tourism mainstay in Leitrim. However, there has been a decline in its popularity over the past decade, says Ms McDermott, with younger holiday-makers showing little interest in the sport. In response, the country has attempted to brand itself as a manifestation of the "hidden" Ireland - a step off the beaten track, a place where one may dabble in the eclectic and incongruous, whether this be eco-tourism (the Organic Centre at Rossinver, north Leitrim holds courses in organic gardening ) or a trip resonant of the "Wild West" to Drumcoura City, Ballinamore.
"For a county such as Leitrim, the challenge is turning traditional disadvantages into advantages," says Ms McDermott.
"The fact that we may have attracted few tourists in the past could be seen in the negative. We have chosen to take the opposite viewpoint, to sell ourselves as unspoiled - the Ireland that you are missing although it's in front of your eyes."
