The abbey, the barracks and the Royal: Boyle's old town in a morning

Boyle's three big buildings sit within a few hundred metres of each other, and you can see all of them in a morning without moving the car. They were built six hundred years apart, and between them they tell most of the town's story: the monks who gave it a name, the landlords who gave it a big house, and the coaching inn that gave it a hotel for 230 years and then, in 2012, didn't.

Start with the abbey

The Irish for Boyle is Mainistir na Búille, the abbey of the Boyle river, so start there. It is about 400 metres east of the town bridge. Monks came from Mellifont, the first Cistercian house in Ireland, in the twelfth century, under the protection of the MacDermotts, who ruled the country around Lough Key. The OPW describes Boyle as one of the most powerful early Cistercian foundations in Ireland and among the foremost in Connacht.

The building has had a hard time since. Cromwellian forces occupied it in 1659, and over the following centuries it was used to house soldiers, which explains the mutilation you will notice in places. What survives is still impressive: the long nave arcade, the crossing tower, and the carved capitals, which are the thing to look for. One is carved with two cockerels, and the OPW picked it out for its own photo gallery. The visitor centre is in the gatehouse, which was restored and dates from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

A visit takes about half an hour, guided or on your own, and in 2026 an adult ticket was €5. The abbey is seasonal: it closed for the 2026 season on 16 September and opens again in spring, on a date the OPW publishes on heritageireland.ie.

Walk back to King House

King House is the white Georgian mansion on Military Road, a few minutes' walk back towards the centre, and it is unusual before you even go in. Irish big houses are normally at the end of a long avenue on their own demesne. This one is in the middle of the town, because that is where the King family, who took over the MacDermott lands after the Cromwellian settlement, chose to put it in the early eighteenth century.

They did not stay. The family moved to Rockingham, their new estate on Lough Key, and the house became a barracks. For most of the nineteenth century it was the depot of the Connaught Rangers. After independence the Irish Army had it, then it spent years as a merchant's store, and by the 1980s it was close to being knocked down. Roscommon County Council bought it in 1987 and restored it, and in 2025 it marked thirty years as a visitor attraction.

The guided tour runs through four centuries, from Gaelic Ireland to the foundation of the state, and takes in the Connaught Rangers collection and the old jail cells. The house also holds the Boyle Civic Art Collection, a collection of gifts from Mary McAleese's time as President, and a small exhibition about Maureen O'Sullivan, who was born a few yards from the house and went on to play Jane in the Tarzan films. Tours run from Easter Saturday to Halloween, 11:00 to 17:00 Monday to Saturday and 11:00 to 16:00 on Sunday, closed on Mondays in April, May, September and October. An adult ticket is €10. The house is fully accessible, with a lift between floors.

Behind the house is the courtyard, which you can visit on its own without a ticket. The tea rooms are here, open Monday to Saturday, and so is the Boyle Craft Shop and Úna Bhán's tourist information point. If it is a Saturday, the Courtyard Market is on from ten until two.

Finish at the Royal

Walk down to the river and on to Bridge Street, and you come to the third building, which most visitors walk past. The Royal was built in 1782 by an innkeeper called John Freeman as a coaching inn on the Dublin to Sligo road. It was the town's hotel for 230 years. Yeats stayed there, and so did Maud Gonne and Maureen O'Sullivan, and local families held their weddings there.

It closed in 2012 and went derelict, and Boyle has had no hotel since, which local councillors and the town's TD have been campaigning about for years. Roscommon County Council bought it in 2017, and in July 2023 it reopened as An Ríoga, an enterprise centre with a gallery on the ground floor. It is the first piece of a regeneration plan the town calls Boyle 2040, and the idea, as the town team put it at the opening, is for Boyle to turn towards its river instead of keeping its back to it.

The New Art Gallery on the ground floor shows and sells local art, craft and design, and it is a good place to end. If you need lunch, Lovage at the Gate Lodge is on the same street, by the river.

If you have time

Walk down to Abbeytown Bridge, the five-arched stone bridge over the river near the abbey. Roscommon County Council's trail notes date it to the late twelfth century and describe it as one of the oldest surviving stone bridges in Ireland.