Travel guides are essential tools for explorers seeking to navigate unfamiliar destinations. They provide detailed insights into local attractions, history, culture, cuisine, and practical travel tips. Whether in print or digital form, these guides help travelers plan their itineraries by highlighting hidden gems and off-the-beaten-path locations, ensuring that visitors experience a destination beyond the typical tourist spots.

For readers who love learning more about specific destinations, including lesser known, but just as fascinating, locations and oddities, consider the new book by Brinsley McNamara that’s all about Ireland’s more eccentric points of interest.

Brinsley McNamara is a writer, video maker and adventurer. He is the protagonist of the Weird Ireland social media channel where he wanders around the Emerald Isles looking for weird and fascinating stuff to document and quests to complete. He plans on clearing Ireland before moving onto elsewhere. Brinsley hails from County Westmeath, a place immortalized in the book “The Valley of the Squinting Windows” by Brinsley McNamara, who also hailed from the same spot. “Weird Ireland: An Unofficial Guide to the Island” is his first book. (Mobius & Laurence King Publishing, 2025)

A hill in County Down that cars roll up?
A bridge in County Mayo that plays music?
A chair that can cure madness in County Louth?
Giant monster sightings on the lakes and seas of Ireland?
The sensational summer of the moving Mary statue in County Cork?
Even Irish ice pop lore?

From the social media phenomenon Weird Ireland comes a journey through strange and fascinating stories from across the island, as Brinsley McNamara shares his oddity obsession in the distinctive voice fans have come to love – witty, precise, and straight up weird.

UFOS and fairy forts, whispering arches and matchmaking festivals, relics and Sheela na Gigs, standing stones and moving statues, lake monsters and healing rocks, it’s all featured in this strictly off-the-beaten-track journey into the bizarre.

Featuring illustrations by acclaimed Dublin illustrator Eoin Whelehan, this is a book to be cherished by all seekers of the strange, rare and peculiar.