Westport earns its place in a Mayo trip by making the evening easy. After the long road from Dublin, Galway or Cong, the car can stay where it is. The Carrowbeg river path leads into a compact town of stone bridges, painted shopfronts and Georgian streets, with dinner close enough to reach on foot.
The mistake is to treat Westport as the attraction rather than the base. Walk the river in the early evening, choose one table, then leave the grand view for morning. Clew Bay and Croagh Patrick reveal themselves properly west of town, on the road toward Murrisk and Louisburgh. From the centre, you only sense that wider landscape waiting beyond the roofs.
For a first night in Mayo, this is the useful contrast to what follows. Westport is sociable and legible. Achill, Erris and Delphi are not. Stay close enough to walk to dinner, then leave after breakfast with fuel in the tank and no need to circle back through town. That small decision gives the coast another hour.