Seven days in Ireland, in a wheelchair

Every accessible Ireland itinerary I have seen puts a walking tour on the arrival afternoon and every one of them is wrong. Between the flight, the assistance handover at Dublin Airport and the twenty minutes it takes to confirm your chair came off the aircraft in the condition it went on, the day is spent. Plan for that and it is a pleasant day. Plan against it and it is the day the trip started badly.

Book the accessible taxi in advance by phone rather than through an app. Get to the hotel, get the chair checked, and then go and sit somewhere with a view of Dublin doing its evening. That is the entire brief.

Dublin has two surfaces. There is the Georgian and Victorian city, which is broad pavement, dropped kerbs and level doors, and there is the medieval city, which is setts, thresholds and Temple Bar. Today is entirely the first one, and it turns out to contain almost everything worth seeing.

Start on the Grand Canal towpath from Baggot Street, which is two and a half flat kilometres of red brick and lock gates with a coffee at each end. Then Merrion Square, then the National Gallery, which is fully lift served and free. In the afternoon, the Guinness Storehouse, because seven floors of lifts ending in the only unobstructed view of the city is a genuinely great accessible visit and I will not be embarrassed about recommending it.

The Luas tram is the quiet advantage here. Level boarding at every stop, no ramp, no notice, no conversation with anybody. If your hotel is near the line you can move around this city entirely on your own terms, which is not something you can say in most European capitals.

This is the day people are nervous about and it is the day that converts them. Heuston is staffed, level and used to this. Book the wheelchair space when you book the ticket, give twenty four hours notice for the ramp, and somebody will be standing on the platform when the doors open. On the way down the country flattens into the Barrow valley and you understand why the Normans stopped here.

Kilkenny is medieval, which means the Medieval Mile is genuinely bumpy. Do not fight it. The castle side is the newer pavement, the parkland is sealed the whole way, and the rose garden is level. Take the lower half of the Mile, take your time, and leave the round tower at St Canice's alone, because it is a ladder inside a stone cylinder and it is not happening.

Cork sits on the flat, on an island in a river, and the centre is a grid rather than a maze. After Kilkenny it feels like the city was designed by somebody sympathetic. The English Market is the anchor: level tiled floor throughout the ground level, wide aisles if you go before eleven, an accessible toilet inside the building and a lift to the gallery restaurant above.

Go at half nine. By one o'clock the aisles are a scrum and the whole advantage disappears. Eat upstairs looking down at it, which is the best twenty euro lunch in the country and one of the few times in Ireland that the accessible route has the better view.

The afternoon is deliberately soft. Cork is a walking city and the pleasure is the walking, or the wheeling, along the Lee. Save the energy. Tomorrow is the long one.

West Cork and Kerry are where public transport stops being the answer, and where a wheelchair accessible vehicle with a driver earns its cost for the week. The roads narrow, the walls close in, and the difference between a beautiful drive and a stressful one is who is holding the wheel.

Kinsale in the morning is a harbour town with a sealed promenade along the water, and you should do exactly that and no more. The Scilly walk beyond the point tilts toward the water with a camber that stops being pleasant quickly. Turn around where the surface changes. The view does not improve after that.

Then west. The road to Killarney is the moment the trip changes register: farmland gives way to mountain and the light goes long. Arrive in the evening, do nothing, and let tomorrow be the good one.

If you take one thing from this guide, take this. Muckross House sits in gardens where sealed and compacted paths run all the way to the shore of the lake, with Torc and the Reeks rising directly across the water. Accessible parking at the house, accessible toilets at the house and at the garden restaurant, and a level route between them.

There is no compromise in this day. It is not the accessible version of Kerry, it is Kerry, and the people who walked in from the car park see exactly what you see. That is rarer than it should be and it is the reason we end the route here rather than starting with it.

Torc Waterfall in the late afternoon is a short pull on compacted stone to the lower platform, which is genuinely worth it. Everything above that platform is stone steps and there is no way around them, so take the falls from below and go back to the lake.

The last morning is the one I would defend hardest against being cut. Knockreer is a three kilometre paved circuit entered from the Deenagh Lodge gate at the edge of Killarney town, and within four minutes of leaving the pavement you are looking at the MacGillycuddy's Reeks over open parkland with nobody else on the path.

There is one long gentle descent toward the river and the same climb back, which is the only real work of the week. Do it early, before the coaches, and give yourself an hour longer than you think you need so that the last thing this trip does is slow down rather than speed up.

Then the train from Killarney to Heuston, which is staffed at both ends, and out of Dublin the following morning. Seven days, four bases, one ferry of assumptions quietly overturned.