The 1.4 kilometres that hold the whole town

Carrick is small. You can walk everything the town has to show a visitor in under an hour, and the walk is better than the drive because two of the best things on it are easy to drive past without noticing. This is a loop of about 1.4 km, starting and finishing at The Dock.

Start at the courthouse

The Dock sits on St George's Terrace, west of the town centre and facing the river. It is the old Leitrim county courthouse, designed by William Farrell in the classical style that was standard for Irish county court buildings in the early nineteenth century, and it was the place the county's justice and local government were administered from. Leitrim County Council restored it and reopened it as an arts centre in 2005.

Inside there are three galleries, a performance space, artists' studios, the Jury Room cafe and the Leitrim Design House. The galleries are free to walk into and open Tuesday to Saturday from ten to five; the building itself runs Monday to Saturday, ten to six. Both close on bank holidays, which is the detail that catches people out on a long weekend. The Design House represents work by more than 250 makers in ceramics, glass, paper, wood, textiles, metal and jewellery, and is the answer to the question of what to buy in Leitrim that is not a fridge magnet.

Along the terrace

Walk east. Hatley Manor, a restored Georgian house, is set back on your left: it belonged to the St George family, the landlords who gave the terrace its name and who appear throughout the town's nineteenth-century record. The terrace runs on past the post office and into the middle of town at the town clock.

The smallest room in town

A few metres past the clock, at the junction where Main Street meets Bridge Street, is a doorway between two shopfronts. Behind it is the Costello Memorial Chapel: sixteen feet long by twelve wide, 192 square feet of floor.

Edward Costello, a Carrick businessman who had farmed at Dromore before moving into the town, built it after his wife Mary Josephine died in 1877 at the age of forty-six. It was dedicated on 22 April 1879, and after the consecration her embalmed body, in a metal coffin, was placed in a sunken vault to the left of the entrance under a thick slab of specially made glass. Costello died in March 1891 and was placed in the matching vault on the right. The inscriptions on both coffins can still be read with a torch. Mass was said in the chapel on the first Friday of every month from its consecration until his death, and no service has been held in it since.

You will see it described everywhere as the second smallest chapel in the world. That claim comes from the chapel's own literature and from the Kiltoghert parish, both of which hedge it as a reputation rather than a ranking, and nobody has ever adjudicated it. The 192 square feet is the fact. Take the superlative as folklore and the room as remarkable on its own terms.

Up Main Street

Turn north. On the western footpath, set into the pavement, is a line of bronze plaques. They run from the gate of St George's Heritage Centre up towards Summerhill, which was formerly called Gallows Hill, and they represent an adult and a child making their way towards the workhouse. It is the quietest piece of public memorial in the town and most people walk over it without looking down.

St Mary's Catholic Church, halfway up, is Neo-Gothic, designed by the Dublin architect W. H. Hague and dedicated on 19 October 1879. Fr Thomas Fitzgerald, the priest who built it, is buried in the chancel.

Church Lane

At the top, St George's Church of Ireland and the heritage centre share a site. The parish church moved here from Kiltoghert in 1698, was rebuilt in 1829 and had its interior reconstructed between 1910 and 1914. It holds a Telford organ of 1847 and a Plagemann altarpiece.

The heritage centre's exhibition is organised around what it calls Twin Traditions, the four hundred years in which Gaelic and Planter Carrick lived alongside each other from the town's 1613 charter onwards. The workhouse material is the part that stays with you. Between 1849 and 1852, more than four thousand Irish girls were sent from workhouses to Australia under the Earl Grey assisted emigration scheme; sixty of them left the Carrick workhouse and forty left Mohill. Their names and their parents' names are on display in the reading room of the Workhouse Attic. A bronze sculpture of two of the girls leaving was put up by the Carrick on Shannon Heritage Group in 2025. The centre opens Monday to Friday from ten to five and Saturday from nine to four, and it is closed on Sundays.

Down to the water

Come back down Main Street, go left at Flynn's corner into Bridge Street, and the town drops towards the river. The bridge at the bottom was built in 1846, replacing a nine-arch stone crossing which had replaced a wooden one. It went up as part of the same 1840s works that dredged the river, cut the Jamestown Canal and built the quays: before that, the head of the Shannon Navigation was downstream at Drumsna.

Turn right along the Quay. Carrick on Shannon Rowing Club has been on this water since 1836 and the club describes itself as the oldest rowing club in the country. Its sprint regatta runs on the river in front of the town in summer and is free to watch from the wall. A little further and you are back at the marina, where the hire cruisers turn, and The Dock is two minutes on.

The whole thing is on footpaths, with one crossing of the main road at the bridge, and none of it costs anything except the heritage centre.