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Private Day Trip to the Cliffs of Moher from Dublin
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From €1045 per person
Your driver-guide Paul takes you west to the Cliffs of Moher in a luxury Mercedes minivan - private, no shared seats, and completely at your own pace. There’s no rushing from stop to stop, no waiting on other passengers. You go when you’re ready and stay as long as you like.
The route follows the Wild Atlantic Way, so the journey itself is worth savouring - rugged coastline, mountains, and some genuinely beautiful stretches of road before you reach the cliffs. At the Cliffs of Moher, Paul brings you to a private viewing area rather than the standard visitor arrival point, which means better positions for photos and a bit more breathing room. The Burren is on the way back - a unique limestone landscape with its own quiet character, worth a proper look rather than a quick drive-through.
The full trip runs 10 hours from Dublin.
The private viewing area Paul uses at the Cliffs of Moher avoids the main visitor arrival point, which sees the bulk of coach traffic between 11am and 2pm. That’s one of the practical advantages of a private tour - the timing is yours rather than dictated by the group itinerary.
The cliffs stretch over 8 kilometres and the clifftop paths are walkable in both directions from the visitor centre. The northward path toward Doolin gets quieter within the first ten minutes of walking and gives you the same cliff edge with far fewer people. Even in a two-hour stop there’s time to move beyond the crowd, find a spot, and just watch the Atlantic for a while. Doolin itself is 6 km north of the cliffs - Gus O’Connor’s pub has been running trad sessions since 1832 and the ferry pier connects to the Aran Islands.
The southern end of the cliffs above Liscannor is where the Hag’s Head trail starts - 5 km of open headland with no turnstile and no car-park fee. Liscannor’s pier is still working, and Vaughan’s Anchor Inn on the main street does seafood off the local boats. John Philip Holland, who designed USS Holland - the first submarine the US Navy commissioned - was born here in 1841.
On the Burren return, the limestone pavement is one of those landscapes that rewards slow looking. More than 700 plant species grow in the cracks of the rock - including orchids and plants more typical of the Mediterranean than the west of Ireland. If Paul stops at Poulnabrone portal tomb, it dates to around 3800 BC and was used for communal burial. It’s one of the most photographed sites in Ireland and still has a sense of real age about it in person.
The Burren proper runs through Ballyvaughan on the northern bay shore - a harbour village where the limestone meets Galway Bay and Monk’s Pub on the pier does chowder worth stopping for. Coming over Corkscrew Hill (a famine road from the 1840s, still in use) brings you down to Lisdoonvarna, the spa town at the Burren edge where four naturally warm mineral springs still bubble up out of the rock. The Roadside Tavern does trad sessions most weekends.
Bring layers even in summer. The cliff edge is exposed and the temperature drops from the car to the clifftop faster than expected. The Atlantic puts its own weather in.