Glen Cove

The county town of Clare, its medieval street plan still wound tightly around a Franciscan friary, and one of Ireland’s best-known homes of traditional music.

Ennis grew up around a Franciscan friary founded in the thirteenth century by the O’Brien dynasty, and its town centre still follows that medieval layout: narrow, winding streets that open unexpectedly into small squares, with the friary’s ruins still standing near the heart of it. It is one of the most intact medieval town plans in Ireland, and simply walking its streets is one of the pleasures of staying here.

The town is also, by wide agreement, one of the great centres of Irish traditional music. Pub sessions happen regularly through the year, not just staged for visitors but genuinely part of the town’s social life, and Ennis has hosted the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the largest traditional music festival in the world, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors when it comes to town. For anyone with an interest in trad music, a night or two in an Ennis B&B gives real access to that scene.

O’Connell Square, at the centre of town, is dominated by a tall Doric column raised in the 1860s in honour of Daniel O’Connell, the Clare-elected champion of Catholic Emancipation, a reminder of the county’s outsized role in nineteenth-century Irish politics.

Ennis also works well as a touring base for the rest of Clare. Bunratty Castle and Folk Park is a short drive toward Limerick, and the Cliffs of Moher, Clare’s best-known natural landmark, are under an hour away on the road out toward the coast, which makes Ennis a practical place to base a stay covering several of the county’s main attractions rather than moving accommodation each night.