Cavan’s 365 Lakes: A Tour of the Lakes & Rivers County
The claim, repeated by every tourist board, website, and local with a captive audience, is that County Cavan has 365 lakes — one for every day of the year.
The number is suspiciously neat, which is how you know marketing is involved. The actual number, depending on who you believe and how you define a lake, is somewhere between “a lot” and “too many to count”. The point stands either way: this county is mostly water wearing a thin disguise of land.
That water is not decoration. It shaped the county, watered its history, and currently provides the backdrop for most of its best days out. Here’s a tour of the lakes that matter, in the order you should see them.
Lough Oughter: the lake that’s actually a conspiracy of lakes
Lough Oughter, just east of Cavan town, is technically one lake and practically a flooded river valley that refuses to admit it. It’s a drowned landscape of islands, fingers, and inlets left over from the last Ice Age, and it’s protected as a Special Area of Conservation and a Special Protection Area, which is conservation-speak for “the wildlife here is doing something right, leave it alone”.
Killykeen Forest Park wraps around it, five miles from the town, with walking trails, a lakeshore loop, and more herons than you have ever seen in one place. The park is run by Coillte and the wildlife people, which means the paths are proper and the facilities are honest. It’s the closest thing Cavan has to a public park that doesn’t know it’s a public park.
And out in the middle of it all sits Cloughoughter Castle, a circular 13th-century ruin on its own island, reachable only by boat. The lake made the castle possible; the castle made the lake famous. Paddle out to it, and you’ll understand the arrangement.
Lough Sheelin: where the trout have a reputation to maintain
Lough Sheelin, in the south of the county, is the lake that anglers talk about in the way other people talk about football. It’s one of the great trout loughs of Ireland, a limestone lake with the food chain to prove it, and the fishing here is taken seriously by people who take very little else seriously. The serious anglers are out at first light, the way other people are out for a Sunday lie-in, and they will tell you, at length, about the one that got away.
Even if you’ve never held a rod, the shore is worth the drive. The lake sits low in the landscape, the water changes colour with the weather, and on a still evening it does that thing Irish lakes do where the sky and the water swap places. Bring a flask, find a bank, and sit. The trout will not care about you, and that’s the point.
Beyond the trout, Cavan is properly famous in angling circles for its coarse fishing — the pike, perch, and bream waters that keep the quiet corners of the county busy all year. The pike in particular have a following that borders on devotion, and a winter’s day on a pike water is the sort of cold you only feel once, which is once more than you intended.
The Erne connection: Belturbet and the water road north
The county’s northern lakes connect, via the Erne system, to the whole water world of the border country. Belturbet, fourteen kilometres north of Cavan town on the N3, sits right on the Erne, and it has been a boating town for longer than anyone can remember. The river there is wide, slow, and full of boats in the summer months, and the town has the unhurried air of a place that has always measured time by the water.
It’s the gateway to one of the best boating holidays in Ireland, and you don’t need to own a boat to enjoy it: hire outfits along the waterway will set you up for a day, a weekend, or a week, and there’s a particular pleasure in doing your shopping in one town and having lunch in the next, having arrived by river. The locks do the work; you just steer and look at the herons.
The wild swimmers and the winter birds
Cavan’s lakes pull double duty. In the summer, they’re the county’s open-air leisure centre — the cold-water swimmers have their spots, the kayakers have their routes, and the families have their jetties. In the winter, the same water hosts the birds. Lough Oughter and its connected loughs are protected as a Special Protection Area precisely because of the wintering wildfowl, and on a grey January afternoon the lake can look like a feathered convention with a quorum problem. Bring binoculars; you’ll be glad you did.
The swimming deserves its own paragraph, because Irish cold-water swimming is not a hobby, it’s a personality type. The devotees will tell you the lakes are at their best in November, which should tell you everything about the personality type. If you’re joining them, go with someone who knows the water, mind the drop-offs, and remember that the swim is optional and the flask is not.
Kayaks, boats, and the art of the slow afternoon
If you want my actual recommendation for a day on the lakes, it’s this: hire a kayak somewhere on Lough Oughter, paddle the short crossing to Cloughoughter Castle, and spend an hour floating in the lee of a 13th-century ruin that has been waiting for exactly this audience. You’ll come back wet, tired, and unreasonably happy, which is the standard outcome for a good day on Cavan water. There are hire outfits around the lough, and they’ll set you up without any prior experience or, crucially, any judgment about your paddling.
The Shannon-Erne Waterway: the lake highway
Cavan’s lakes are not just scenery; they’re a road system. The Shannon-Erne Waterway connects the River Shannon to Lough Erne, cutting through the county and linking 63 kilometres of navigable water, with locks that have been moving boats since the 1860s and a second life as one of Ireland’s best canal-cruising routes. Hire a boat, or just watch the lock gates do their slow, ancient work. Either way, you’re looking at the county’s original motorway network.
The smaller lakes, where the locals actually go
Ask anyone in Cavan where they’d actually spend a summer evening and they won’t name the famous loughs. They’ll name the small ones — the tucked-away sheets of water with a jetty and a bench and no sign. Lough Ramor up by Virginia, the many quiet corners of the Erne system, the pike water that the coarse anglers guard like a family secret. The best lakes in Cavan are the ones without a car park big enough for a bus.
Wild swimming has its own following on these waters. The cold-water crew treat the lakes as a year-round gym, and the sensible among them treat the summer as a reward. If you fancy it, ask locally for the safe spots, go with someone who knows them, and remember the first rule of Irish lake swimming: the water is always colder than it looks, and the weather is always worse than it was.
The arithmetic of 365
Whether Cavan actually has 365 lakes, one per day, is a question nobody will ever settle, because the people who could count them are too busy fishing, swimming, or sitting on a jetty watching the light change. It’s the sort of statistic that should be true, and that’s the best kind.
What’s certain is this: a county this watery builds its whole culture around the water, including the food. After a day on the lakes, the correct move is a table in town, and the town’s answer to hungry lake people is the same as it always is — the 72-hour sourdough at Luso, which has been feeding wet, tired, satisfied people since it opened. The menu is at https://luso.ie/dine-in-menu/, and more about the place is on the Luso website.
The lakes will still be there tomorrow, getting fuller. They always are. Bring a towel, bring a flask, and bring a sense of humour about the weather. You’re in the wettest county in Ireland, and sure, it’s lovely.
Further reading
https://www.coillte.ie/site/killykeen-forest-park/