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3-Day Cliffs of Moher, Connemara and Aran Islands Rail Tour from Dublin
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From €942 per person
The west of Ireland done properly - Galway Bay, the Cliffs of Moher, the wild open spaces of Connemara, and a trip out to the Aran Islands. This three-day rail and coach tour from Dublin uses Galway city as your base, with two nights in a three-star hotel right in the heart of town.
All travel is by rail and coach from Dublin Heuston Station. A Railtours Ireland host travels with you on the trains and a qualified driver-guide handles the coaching days. Entry to the Cliffs of Moher is included. Groups are small - maximum 10 people.
Meeting point: Check in 20 minutes before departure (6:40am). The yellow Railtours Ireland check-in stand is near the Customer Service Desk at Heuston Station - look for the person in the bright yellow jacket.
Your base for two nights is Galway city, right in the medieval core. The evenings are yours to use. After the day’s tour finishes, the most rewarding thing to do in Galway is walk the laneways without a plan - Shop Street to Quay Street, then left at random. The Claddagh neighbourhood is at the end of Quay Street where the old fishing village meets the harbour; the Claddagh ring (hands holding a crowned heart) started here, in a place where boats went out and people waited for them to come back.
For dinner, Ard Bia at Nimmo on Quay Street has a locally-led menu that changes with the market and a dining room upstairs that has been turning out memorable meals for years. If you want something quicker, the Gourmet Tart Company does hand pies and proper coffee with queues that move fast. The Dough Bros on Middle Street does sourdough pizza on a walk-in basis.
Galway has trad music most nights of the week. Tigh Coili on Mainguard Street is an Irish-language pub with a high-standard session nightly - not for show, the players are there because they want to play. The Crane Bar on Sea Road has three floors and sessions that happen whether there’s an audience or not. Start around ten when the music is properly under way.
The Aran Islands - Inis Mór, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr - sit out in Galway Bay and the ferry crossing takes about forty minutes from Rossaveal to the nearest island. The islands are Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) territory, and stone-walled fields run to the cliff edges. The weather decides whether the ferry runs; your driver-guide will have the latest on conditions.
The Connemara section of the tour is one of the best drives in Ireland: stone walls, mountain passes, lakes and bog, with Letterfrack and the Joyce Country stretching west. The landscape feels genuinely empty in a way that’s rare in Ireland.
At the Cliffs of Moher, entry is included. The 214-metre cliff face runs for eight kilometres and the clifftop walk is exposed - wind can be strong at any time of year. The views north towards the Aran Islands on a clear day are worth the walk beyond the main viewing area.
Liscannor is 8km south of the visitor centre on the coast road - the village where the Hag’s Head end of the cliff walk starts. If the tour schedule allows any flexibility here, Vaughan’s Anchor Inn is the third-generation seafood pub the village is known for. Doolin is 15 minutes north on the same R478 road. Three hamlets, four pubs, and the ferry pier the Aran Islands ferries once ran from - the Doolin to Inis Oírr crossing is 20 minutes. Gus O’Connor’s has had a trad session running most nights since 1832.
The Connemara section passes through Oughterard on the N59 - the last village before Connemara proper, on the western shore of Lough Corrib. Aughnanure Castle, an O’Flaherty tower house from around 1500, sits 3km east of the village and is run by the OPW. After Oughterard the road west opens up into Clifden, the capital of Connemara. The Derrygimlagh bog south of Clifden is where Marconi sent the first commercial transatlantic wireless signal in 1907, and where Alcock and Brown crash-landed after the first non-stop transatlantic flight in 1919.
For the Aran Islands, Kilronan is the main village on Inis Mór. Dún Aonghasa - a prehistoric stone fort on a cliff edge, built somewhere between 1100 and 500 BC - is a 3km return walk from the village. Bikes are the way to get around the island. Tigh Ned in Kilronan has sessions most nights and is the central pub. Book ferries ahead in summer.