A three-day family trip around Co Waterford: ‘the most amazingest day ever’ is the kids’ verdicts

Who books the holiday in your family? Picking the right destination, taking time off work or school, the travel, the cost – when you need a break it can all get a bit high stakes.

There is an alternative. Taking a sneaky few days nearer to home now and then can mean maximum holiday for minimum faff. Waterford, just two hours from Dublin, has recently won a string of accolades, including being named in Condé Nast Traveller’s Best Places to Go in 2024 and in the New York Times’s 52 Places to Go this Year. For our family of four, a three-day break there definitely delivered.

Having left home at 10am, we’re cycling on the Waterford Greenway by noon. The car park at the SETU West Campus on the outskirts of the city is free, has plenty of space for vehicles with bike racks, and it’s a quick gateway to 46km of glorious, car-free pathway. Built on the old Waterford-to-Cork railway line, the Greenway is perfect for small boys mastering gears. As our small peloton makes its way along the banks of a swollen river Suir, spotting castles and cormorants, the holiday has definitely begun. In an alternative scenario, we’d still be at airport security.

Mount Congreve Gardens, our first stop, is just 3.4km away. Surrounding the 18th-century house are 16km of trails that kids will love. There are carpets of fallen magnolia blossoms and rhododendrons purple, white and crimson have taken up the baton in flower. Gardener Gwen, a lecturer at the on-site horticultural school, says the flowers of the handkerchief tree are her favourite. She points out a nondescript bush known to confound visitors with its chocolatey smell.

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Lunch is at the Stables Cafe by the Pantry at Cliff, where you’ll find Guinness brown bread sandwiches, cottage pie and amazing salads from the bountiful four-acre walled garden. When crops are abundant, expect to leave with a complimentary lettuce or two, says restaurant manager Nelson.

It’s back on the bikes to catch Waterford Suir Valley Railway’s 3pm departure from Kilmeaden station for a spin trip on the narrow-gauge railway. The line, which opened in 1878, closed to passengers in 1967, says volunteer train driver John. He’s a Bus Éireann driver in ‘real life’, and his childhood memories are of sitting in his train-driver father’s lap.

Yes, trains are in the blood and railway enthusiasts play a long game – they restored and reopened Kilmeaden station in 2003. They have global contacts too, it seems. The carriages we ride today are from a theme park in Argentina, pulled by an engine that worked in the excavation of the Channel Tunnel. The Tower Hotel in Waterford city, our base for the weekend, has a few aces up its sleeve for us – a generously-sized family room, a relaxed vibe and a pool. Storage for the bikes and the bike rack? That’s no problem, says manager Michael. The staff couldn’t be more helpful. It is a few minutes’ walk from everything too, including Waterford institution of 22 years, Bodega, where we head for dinner.

It’s buzzy with twinkly fairy lights and there are lots of regulars. We’re new, but the staff read us well – crayons, paper, a Dungarvan pale ale and a margarita arrive pronto. Plump olives and smoky hummus with sourdough toast take the edge off before mains from Munster of Ardsallagh goat’s cheese risotto and 12-hour slow-cooked Crowe Farm pork belly. The juicy burger on the kids’ menu renders the seven-year-old speechless for 10 minutes. A win.

It can be hard to interest small kids in history, but the King of the Vikings virtual reality experience the next morning does it. Our experience starts off in the real world of a reconstructed Viking house where costumed guides tell us about the 10 years of bad weather and harvests in Norway that spurred Viking raids. The more fertile Ireland, with its monastic treasures a mere four days by longship, was the perfect pillage.

Donning our virtual reality headsets we come face-to-face with history. We’re not hearing about a village being raided, we’re in it. All four of us shouted and yelped our way through the action. Spoiler alert: the Vikings win and name the place Vadrarjfordr.

We have a ‘freedom pass’ that includes access to six museums as well as the Epic guided walking tour. Our guide Cliona gives us a whistle-stop tour of some of the city’s treasures – and historic personalities. The most colourful of these was the swashbuckling Thomas Francis Meagher. Radical and inspired by the French Revolution, he is credited with flying the Irish Tricolour for the first time in 1848 in Waterford. He was sentenced to death after the Young Ireland rebellion of that year, but bargained it down to a stint in Tasmania. He married there but abandoned his wife for New York, where he married up. Despite little military knowledge, he went on to become an American Civil War hero, a pallbearer at president Abraham Lincoln’s funeral and governor of Montana.

The ‘official regimental cocktail’ of the US army’s Fighting 69th brigade is a mix of French champagne and Irish whiskey that Meagher invented, Cliona tells us, and the brigade visits Waterford periodically to toast him. I could listen to these stories for hours, but kids are antsy so they have a rest while I hit the House of Waterford Crystal tour. Much Waterford Crystal manufacturing happens outside of Ireland these days and the company is now a subsidiary of a Finnish group, but some 60,000 items a year are still produced in the city. The master glass blowers, who can shape molten crystal using only their breath and simple wooden moulds, a technique unchanged for centuries, are impressive to watch. Master cutters do an eight-year apprenticeship, memorising 100 patterns.

I watch master cutter Philip at work, a Waterford Crystal veteran of 52 years. After a quick bite at the tasty Waterford Cafe on site, we’re off to Dunmore East for something far less genteel. Heights, confined spaces and weapons – the Dunmore Adventure Centre is perfect for energetic kids. It’s a local business that employs more than 40 staff in peak season.

“Will we start with the caving?” asks our instructor Andy. Crawling, twisting and squeezing through 100m of artificial caves? That’s a hard ‘no’ from me. The other three will benefit from the team-building though, I tell him. The eight-year-old in particular absolutely loves it. Next is the indoor climbing wall and Andy could not be more encouraging. Harnesses on and up we go, picking our way up the wall and learning to trust the ropes to glide us back down gently. Doing something new and challenging together is a thrill.

Back on terra firma, we try archery and the kids trounce the adults, of course. Are we brave enough for one last activity, Andy asks? It’s outside to a ropes course high over Dunmore East harbour where we navigate tightropes and shaky bridges that do their best to unbalance us. “I love today” and “the most amazingest day ever” are the kids’ verdicts.

The first 99s of the season have definitely been earned and we head to the East Pier chipper to claim our reward. The menu board, however, is hard to resist and I find myself tucking into a plate of oysters and a glass of prosecco. (The ropes course was hard, okay?)

“Dunmore East was crying out for a casual seafood experience,” says owner Elaine Power, whose family have been in business in the town for over 100 years. Her goal was to “demystify fish” and to democratise oysters. “We ship them to France and China, why not eat them right here?” She started selling them at €1 a pop – “Like a gateway drug, they come back for more.”

Now five years in business, you can have East Pier’s Woodstown Bay oysters naked, or Asian-style with soya, rice vinegar and pickled ginger, or with a locally made kimchi sriracha sauce. The locally grown chips are a hot ticket too. Elaine carries an RNLI pager, Karen who owns the Dunmore Adventure Centre does too. It feels good that our holiday is supporting small business owners who are so invested in their communities.

After recharging at the hotel, it’s a short hop across the road to The Reg for dinner. The premises, a hostelry since the 18th century, was built around the 900-year-old city wall that is still visible through the spine of the building today.

The place has lively bars and cosy snugs. Upstairs is Suas restaurant where we enjoy the calamari and a tasty Thai green curry. There are plenty of well-priced options for kids too. As with everywhere else we have been on this trip, the staff are plentiful, friendly and long-standing.

For our third and final day in Waterford, we spin down Waterford’s Copper Coast to Kilmurrin Cove to experience the ‘hot pod’, one of four beachfront saunas in the county run by husband-and-wife team Dee and Ed. Take a dip first, then sauna, followed by another dip – that’s the secret, according to locals Maurice, Cormac and Derek, with whom we share our sauna experience. It’s a Sunday morning ritual for the men. The sea is bracing, so after a quick dunk, we’re back to the heat again, enjoying the spectacular views from this wonderful ‘Wanderly Wagon’ of heat and chats.

The kids roam happily on the beach as we sweat. We continue along the Copper Coast, named after the 19th-century copper mines located along this spectacular 25km stretch of cliffs. It was named a Unesco Global Geopark in 2015. ‘Geotourism’ can raise awareness of an area’s geological heritage and give local people a sense of pride in their area, explains geologist and Geopark manager Robbie Galvin. This type of tourism stimulates jobs and revenue while protecting the geology, he adds.

The busy not-for-profit cafe at the Geopark Visitor Centre in Bunmahon is a perfect example. The premises, the former church of the Protestant miners who came to the area from Cornwall in the 1800s, was rescued from dereliction 15 years ago. It is now a thriving cafe, employing three people. Robbie brings us to Trá na mBó, walkable from the end of Bunmahon beach where he reads the landscape for us like an interpreter. We spot former mine shafts, just some of the 300 known in the area, sea caves eroded over thousands of years and 390 million-year-old Devonian sandstone rocks that were once the height of Comeraghs. Here’s another Waterford person who loves Waterford. And why wouldn’t he?

Joanne Hunt travelled as a guest of VisitWaterford.com