As I set out in the early hours the weather was fine and the roads were quiet. The latter was to last for the day, but the weather became very changeable.

My main intention was to get to the larger, better known court tombs in west Donegal. These monuments are quite spectacular, having been restored after/during the excavations and they give a sense of what they would have been like.

This corner of Ireland is lovely, with beautifully dramatic coastlines and great monuments.

You may also notice that I have started to use a 1m long stripey pole to help indicate the sizes of most of the monuments. I am mainly doing this to save you from seeing me all over the place for scale purposes! I will, however, only use it sparingly at each site and it will not ruin every photo - it's a little bit on the bright side.

Why when I try to get to copney stone circles does it rain everytime? I had a great morning and then, just as I parked to walk up the hill, the skies opened.

The clouds also made the dusk arrive 40 minutes early, meaning I didn't make it to Sess Kilgreen in time on the way home either.

However, what I did see was all pretty good stuff. The Loughmacroryarea is packed with an incredible amount of monuments that warrant a full weekend of wanderings at some point.

This day was spent taking two Americans (who were visiting Ireland for the first time and wanted to see some of the more remote sites) around the best spots within a Winter-Day's journey from Dublin.

Poor Jane and Aaron landed at 5:50am and were on the road by 8:00am! They soon found out why Ireland is so green, too: Throughout the day we were to experience drizzle, heavy rain, gales, sleet, snow and sun. You have to love the Irish weather.

We saw a good cross section of site types, including standing stones, stone circles, portal tombs and high crosses. We finished the day off at Glendalough.

This was a limited but wonderful day out. I met with Anthony Weir to investigate some rock-art and for me to see a great souterrain.

The weather was fantastic, not only for the time of year, but simply fantastic! It was like a good spring day.

I was going to stop off at the Hill of Tara on the way home, but when I reached the car park and saw it full I decided to head on home. I didn't fancy being among a hundred or so people after such a calm day out.