Slieve League, the cliffs that keep a lower profile

Ask most visitors to Ireland to name the country's tallest sea cliffs and the answer, confidently and usually wrongly, will be the Cliffs of Moher. The actual record belongs to Slieve League in County Donegal, whose highest point falls almost 600 metres to the Atlantic, roughly three times the drop at Moher, and does so along a stretch of coast far fewer people ever reach. The reasons are mostly geographic: Donegal sits at the top corner of Ireland, well off the standard route between Dublin and the west coast's other famous stops, and the road to Slieve League itself narrows to a single track along an exposed ridge that keeps the more nervous drivers, sensibly, well away.

Donegal as a whole has always sat slightly apart from the rest of the Republic, connected to it by a narrow finger of land squeezed between Northern Ireland on two sides, a quirk of the border drawn in 1921 that leaves the county feeling more remote from Dublin than its map position alone would suggest. That relative isolation has kept much of its coast quieter than Clare or Kerry further south, for visitors willing to travel a little further for the reward.

A ridge not for the casual walker

Slieve League's summit ridge includes a stretch known as One Man's Pass, a narrow spine of rock with a serious drop on either side, popular with experienced hillwalkers and entirely unsuitable for anyone without a head for exposure and the right footwear. Most visitors, by land or by sea, are content with the view from lower down, where the cliffs still rise in dark, banded rock straight from the water in a way that needs no further embellishment. On a clear day the effect from a ship passing at a respectful distance is one of the more striking sights available on Ireland's west coast, precisely because so few passengers have seen a photograph of it in advance.

Killybegs, and a harbour built for work

The nearest port of any size is Killybegs, Ireland's largest fishing harbour by the weight of catch landed, a plain, hard-working town rather than a pretty one, built around a trade that has sustained Donegal's economy for generations. It makes an honest counterpoint to the cliffs themselves: one of the country's most dramatic natural features sitting a short distance from one of its most unglamorous working ports, with barely a tourist coach between them. Inland and further along the coast, villages such as Glencolmcille keep alive a slower, older rhythm of Donegal life, Irish-speaking in patches and shaped as much by emigration and the Atlantic weather as by anything a passing itinerary can properly capture in a day. Donegal's Gaeltacht, the officially recognised Irish-speaking region that covers much of the county's west, is among the largest in the country, and the language is heard here in everyday use rather than staged for visitors, in shops and at Mass rather than on a menu translated for effect.

Passing this way

Fred. Olsen's Legends and Landmarks of Ireland, seven nights from Southampton, sails past Slieve League as part of a run up Ireland's north-west coast that also takes in Killybegs, Galway and the Cliffs of Moher before finishing at Cobh.

Scenic Landscapes of Ireland, eight nights from Liverpool, and Coastal Gems and Culture of Ireland, nine nights from Rosyth, both pass the same stretch of coast on their way to or from Killybegs, giving Donegal's cliffs their moment on an itinerary otherwise built around Ireland's better-known stops.

Slieve League rewards patience more than most Irish landmarks: a clear day, a calm sea and a willingness to look at a view nobody has told you, in advance, exactly how to feel about. Unlike Moher, there is no visitor centre to funnel you towards the best angle and no crowd to confirm you have found it; the cliffs simply rise out of the water, roughly where the chart says they will, and leave the rest to whoever happens to be looking. It is one of the few genuinely underrated things left on the Irish coast, and a ship's rail, oddly enough, is one of the better places to appreciate that.