4 Best Sights in Shanagarry, County Cork

Now returned to the village where he grew up, potter Stephen Pearce has reopened the traditional craft pottery that launched his career in the late 1960s. The showroom sells his distinctive, contemporary hand-thrown black-and-cream earthen tableware and the terra-cotta-and-white line, made from organic local clay and both beloved of collectors. The tearoom opens daily from May to September, weekends only in winter. Book a pottery tour in advance, and ask about workshops.

Pearce's simple, practical, but beautiful pottery makes for great, contemporary Irish gifts and souvenirs. U.S. shipping is available if you can't limit yourself to something packable!

The extensive organic gardens here provide herbs and vegetables for the school and the restaurant, and visitors can ramble through wildflower meadows and admire herbaceous borders leading to an ornately crafted shell house, the potager vegetable garden, rustic tree house, and a Celtic maze. A farm walk visits cows in their clover field, rare-breed pigs, and some 400 hens. Conclude your visit in the Farm Shop, open the same hours as the garden.

Darina Allen, Ireland's most famous celebrity chef and slow-food advocate, rules at the Ballymaloe Cookery School, 3 km (2 miles) east. The school offers 12-week residential courses for aspiring professional chefs, and day and half-day courses with famous visiting chefs (including Darina's daughter-in-law, Rachel Allen).

Run by the Kilkenny Shop, the spacious gallery and showroom (with scrumptious home baking in the café) is in the village center. On display are high-end Irish-made crafts including Newbridge silverware, Orla Kiely handbags, and potter Louis Mulcahy's huge bowls and lamps, as well as Irish-made clothing, woolen goods, Irish linen, and jewelry. Several artists and craft makers have studios in the basement, where their work is also for sale.

Shanagarry's most famous Quaker native son was none other than William Penn (1644–1718), the founder of the Pennsylvania colony, who grew up in Shanagarry House, still a private residence in the center of the village. The house's most famous tenant since William Penn was Marlon Brando, who stayed here in the summer of 1995 while filming Divine Rapture in nearby Ballycotton.