Limerick is Ireland's third-largest city, set on the River Shannon where the river widens toward its estuary on the west coast. Its reputation has rebounded in the last decade or two — from Frank McCourt's bleak memoir Angela's Ashes, which the city mostly prefers to forget, to a confident, student-inflected place with a good food scene and a restored medieval heart. It is also the main gateway to the west of Ireland if you're flying into Shannon Airport, and a natural stop between Dublin and Galway or Killarney.
The medieval core is on King's Island, between two branches of the Shannon. King John's Castle, built between 1200 and 1210, dominates the riverfront with five squat towers and thick curtain walls — one of the best-preserved Norman castles in Ireland, with an interpretive visitor centre that handles 800 years of siege, famine, and politics without being dry. A few minutes' walk south, St Mary's Cathedral (begun in 1168) has a working peal of bells and misericords carved in 1480 — the only medieval carved misericords surviving in Ireland. The Hunt Museum, in the old Custom House on the river, holds an extraordinary private collection of roughly 2,000 objects spanning prehistoric Ireland to the 20th century, including a Da Vinci bronze horse, a Picasso sketch, and a coin said to be one of the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. The Treaty Stone on the western bank of the Shannon marks the spot where the 1691 Treaty of Limerick was traditionally signed.
South of the medieval town, the 18th-century Newtown Pery is Limerick's handsome Georgian quarter — long, straight streets of red-brick terraces and fanlight doorways, many now housing bars, cafes, and galleries. The streets around O'Connell Street, Catherine Street, and Thomas Street are the centre of the city's evening life, and the People's Park with the Limerick City Gallery of Art on its south-east corner is its green heart. The Limerick Museum on Henry Street and the Saturday Milk Market are both worth an hour.
Limerick is also an excellent base for the west — see Day Trips for the full list. Bunratty Castle and Folk Park, with its reconstructed Irish village, is fifteen minutes away toward Shannon Airport. The Cliffs of Moher and the limestone moonscape of the Burren are under an hour up the coast, and Killarney and the Ring of Kerry are an hour and a half south. If rugby is your thing, Thomond Park — home of Munster — is where the city's loudest passion plays out on Saturday afternoons. Readers of Angela's Ashes will want to walk Frank McCourt's Limerick at least once.