Midsummer in the Burren (Ireland)

A romantasy trip for up to 15 women. We spend eight nights at Gregans Castle Hotel, a family-run country house hotel in the Burren, County Clare, in the week of Midsummer, when the sun sets after 10pm. No packing up every morning.

The Burren is a limestone landscape on the Atlantic coast, full of 5,000-year-old tombs, stone forts and fairy forts. In the old stories, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the old gods of Ireland, went into hills like these and became the Sídhe, the fairy folk. A lot of today's fae romance comes from those stories.

Before the trip, from January to May 2028, the group reads and watches together online: one main book a month, a myth to go with it and the occasional film night, with two video calls a month, just for the group. Every month has two picks, one closed-door and one spicier, and you choose which you read. By the time you arrive, you know the rest of the group.

Then we go where the stories come from. A folklore and fairy-fort walk, Poulnabrone portal tomb and Caherconnell stone fort. The Cliffs of Moher on foot from Doolin with a local farmer, and their legends of a mermaid and a sea hag. A ferry to Inis Mór and Dún Aonghasa. Corcomroe Abbey and the Flaggy Shore. Lady Gregory's Coole Park, Yeats's tower and an evening in Galway. Lough Gur, where the largest stone circle in Ireland lines up with the Midsummer sunrise. A Clare storyteller tells fairy stories one evening at the hotel.

I'm with you the whole week. We travel by private minibus with a driver, and every day has free time.

This is for you if you read fae romance and want to see the Ireland behind it, you want a week in rural County Clare rather than a city break, and you'd like to arrive already knowing the group. It isn't a Dublin trip or a spa resort.