I wandered Ireland's 'Hidden Heartlands' and found magic everywhere

We're taking it slow.

So slow that we're back in the 1980s with the turf cutters working in a bog, outside Enniskillen, halfway between Belfast and Dublin. Their spades have just struck a bewildering lump about the size of a soccer ball.

It has the texture of candle wax, tastes like soap and smells like cheese.

Carbon dating reveals the archaeological treasure to be a 1000-year-old relic of bog butter, cold-pressed by the past, a dairy concoction buried by a farmer of the late Stone Age as an offering or, perhaps, simply forgotten.

"Is fresh the right word to use?" muses my guide on the Enniskillen Taste Experience walking tour, Mark Edwards. "Well, we wouldn't be spreading it on our toast. And anyway, it's hermetically sealed in a glass case now, behind us in the museum."

Imagination runs deep along the watery spine of Northern Ireland's south-western corner, standing beneath Enniskillen Castle, at the strategic bottleneck of Upper and Lower Lough Erne.

The region tagged as "Hidden Heartlands" is too far inland to be included in Ireland's popular coastal route known as Wild Atlantic Way and too far west to form part of Ireland's Ancient East trail, so it receives fewer visitors. It's here that I'm drifting away from more famous tourist sights to seek out the ancient waterways and woodlands by foot and road, bike and boat.

Edwards is striding ahead along cobblestones, brimming with anecdotes, dispensing greetings to all. He leads into an atmospheric Victorian pub called Blake's where a raucous bridal party has crammed into a snug in the front bar. There's plenty of beery, cheery backslapping among friends as we slip around the back through the hand-carved Game of Thrones door, crafted from one of the legendary fallen beech trees of County Antrim.

"It's not the Blarney Stone," Edwards quips, "so you don't have to kiss it, talk to it, or lick it." Instead, we'll wrap our lips around craft beers "scientifically proven to cure nothing, not even the hangover" before clattering downstairs to Blake's culinary centrepiece. Flavour has become folklore in the vaulted cellar (called 28 at the Hollow) pungent with the scent of smoked aubergine and wild Atlantic cod but Edwards has just mentioned the sleek vessel that's "a bit like a floating living room" awaiting passengers at the Erne Water Taxi departure point down on Broadmeadow. I'm intrigued.

Retracing steps down to the water's edge, there's barely time for introductions before co-skipper Bryan Gallagher casts off ropes, maneuvering the solar-powered Island Discovery away from nesting swans. Our passage begins under Enniskillen's oldest bridge, spanning the narrow channel where the River Erne squeezes between two loughs.

"We're on the highway of history," Gallagher begins. "Everything that's ever happened to us - Vikings, Normans, Christianity - has come by water." When the river was dredged in the 1950s, Bronze Age swords emerged from the murky depths, confirming the significance of "the narrows" as a natural defensive chokepoint. We glide on, past a 14th-century castle reduced to ruin by a schoolboy's prank with dynamite in 1857.

"What happened to the boys?" I ask. "Their headmaster was furious, their parents were angry, but their chemistry teacher was secretly delighted," Gallagher grins.

Kingfishers dart between boughs on heavily wooded riverbanks and a lanky heron glides overhead. "I'm going to turn the engine off and I want you to close your eyes for 30 seconds," he says. "What do you hear apart from water lapping on the bottom of the boat?" Absolute silence.

"It's quiet," whispers Gallagher, "but people forget the magical, mythical, mystical Ireland is still here. We believe in the cures and the powers of this land. We've just got very busy and forgotten about it."

Those who remember magic know that one of Northern Ireland's most powerful and dramatic natural spectacles is within easy reach of Enniskillen. The Stairway to Heaven snakes along one of Europe's first UNESCO-recognised Geoparks.

I'm heading there, next day, looking for an ethereal stairway in the Cuilcagh Mountains spanning the border between County Fermanagh and County Cavan.

Skittish clouds cast islands of shadow across the Cuilcagh Boardwalk Trail that spools upwards on fragile bogland. Skylarks dance in the air along a steep two-kilometre walk (more than 450 stairs) to an imposing peak at 665 metres above sea level.

It's worth the hike. Sun breaks free of clouds to reveal the distant filigree of Atlantic coast. Beneath the boggy blanket at our feet, water gouges mesmerising patterns into bedrock forming the Marble Arch Caves, a discovery that's more than 340 million years old. This is the birthplace of the River Shannon.

At the nearby visitor centre, I've signed up for earth yoga, in the cavernous limestone cathedral below the surface. "It's the oldest yoga studio in the world," says yoga instructor Genny Brown, having gathered a small shoeless group to lie on foam mattresses in the womb of the earth.

Droplets splodge on her head as she leads through poses with a voice barely audible above the gushing roar of rivulets swollen from last night's heavy rain. It hardly matters. This subterranean realm, this Mordor, is a strangely peaceful place insulated from the weight of history pressing down from above, just across the border, in the Republic of Ireland.

It takes roughly 90 minutes to drive from the caves through Cavan town, across the river at Carrick-on-Shannon to arrive at the Georgian Palladian mansion housing the National Irish Famine Museum. Ireland's tragic past comes into sharp focus at the end of the tree-lined avenue at Strokestown Park Estate in County Roscommon.

Confronting tragedy is not easy but an examination of the catastrophic potato famine of the mid-1800s feels essential if I'm to properly grasp Ireland's story.

There's a warming soup and fresh sandwiches to savour in the cafe before tackling the truth of starvation plastered across museum walls. More than 3000 people lived at Strokestown Park until the 1840s when potato blight turned the staple crop into black, putrid mush. Harvests failed and estate tenants were evicted, escorted to Dublin's docks for a journey to the New World on disease-ridden "coffin ships".

Those who stayed in Ireland went to the workhouses or the graveyards. I stumble upon one of these later, in the town of Cavan, at the top of a hill under the brow of a grey-stoned workhouse. No headstones. Just a mass grave marked by a meadow of buttercups bending in the breeze. "Here the poor of the district who died during the Great Hunger were buried," reads a memorial stone. No names. No words.

The aftermath of famine, followed by the Great War, decimated estate revenues, and the old aristocratic order crumbled. The owner of Strokestown Park, Olive Pakenham Mahon, was the talk of London society in the weeks before Europe went to war in 1914, but in the years that followed, she retreated to a handful of scarcely habitable rooms.

Her butler was the only remaining servant and his threadbare uniform hangs on show in one of the bedrooms, caught by a beam of sunlight, heavy with the acrid smell of damp and despair.

Some people walk from here to Dublin along the National Famine Way, a 165-kilometre trail launched to mark the ill-fated journey of the 1490 Strokestown emigrants who left Ireland seeking a better life. Instead, with lighter steps, I'm going to meander through the romantic stories of my childhood - The Turf-Cutter's Donkey and The Grey Goose of Kilnevin - flocking and weaving across the jade green land beside the Shannon.

One of Ireland's most significant early Christian settlements lies not far from Athlone. Clonmacnoise sits at the crossroads of medieval Ireland's two superhighways: the Shannon (Ireland's longest river) and the Slighe Mhor (Great Highway), an ancient and low ridge formed by rocky debris deposited by retreating glaciers.

My arrival coincides with a foreboding storm cloud hovering above the Clonmacnoise Monastic Site. The gradual onset of rain shifts spectral shadows across settlement ruins, but guide Anthony Ryan is keeping a weather eye on visitors, setting a brisk pace between turf and stone.

"Some people think it's great," Ryan smiles. "Some people think it's mad. Some people think you'd get a wart if you put your finger into it. You'd be surprised how many people come here specifically for this and still swear by it today."

So, there it is again, the mundane transformed into the miraculous. The earthy into the ethereal. This is Ireland, after all. What was it Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote? "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

And so, appropriately, my Ireland story finishes more or less where it began. Like a poem.

Perched beside Lough Ree, an easy two hours' drive to Dublin, Glasson Lakehouse is property with another premium position. My room has a balcony opening towards small islands - Inchcleraun and Inchbofin - once housing their own monastic settlements.

Downstairs there's a lounge with tufted leather, waxed timber beams and a fireplace crackling with flames. There is no better place than an Irish hearth with the steady intake of Guinness lending rhetorical velocity to every word.

It's here that I'll linger. With the turf-cutters. Traveling back in time. Slowly.

The writer travelled courtesy of Tourism Ireland