Offaly is largely flat. Approximately 420 square kilometers of it - twenty-one percent of the county - is peatland, more concentrated than in almost any other Irish county. The Bog of Allen extends across the eastern border into Kildare. Clara Bog, Boora Bog, Raheenmore Bog spread across the rest of the county like dark stains on the map. Bord na Mona, the state peat company, exploited these bogs for fuel through most of the twentieth century, draining them, cutting the turf, burning it in midland power stations. The era is now ending. Lough Boora Discovery Park, on cutaway bog, has been replanted with native birch and stocked with the last Irish population of the grey partridge. Sculpture in the Parklands has commissioned permanent installations that now sit among the bog cotton. The Slieve Bloom Mountains rise on the southern border, sharing their slopes with Laois. Arderin, the county's highest peak at 527 meters, sits at their summit.

Around AD 545, the monk Ciaran founded a monastery on a bend in the River Shannon at Clonmacnoise. It became one of the great learning centers of medieval Europe, drawing scholars, scribes, and pilgrims for nearly a thousand years. Eight high crosses, two round towers, a ruined cathedral, the remains of an Augustinian nunnery - the complex is still standing on the same low rise above the Shannon's flood plain, in roughly the same configuration the medieval pilgrims would have seen. The Cross of the Scriptures, carved around AD 900, shows scenes from the Bible in deep panels worn smooth by a thousand years of weather. Vikings raided the site repeatedly. Normans burned it in 1179. The English finally suppressed it in 1552. The stones remained. So did the graveyard, which is still in use - one of the few places in the world where you can be buried among the saints, if your family has been doing it long enough to qualify.

In Birr, in the south of the county, William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, built a telescope in 1845 that remained the largest in the world for the next seventy-two years. He called it the Leviathan of Parsonstown. The primary mirror was six feet across - made of speculum metal because no one knew yet how to silver glass that big. The tube was 54 feet long, suspended between two great walls of masonry that still stand on the Birr Castle grounds. With this telescope, Parsons became the first person to observe the spiral structure of distant galaxies, drawing pictures of nebulae that no one else on Earth could see. The Whirlpool Galaxy was first sketched here. His son Charles Algernon Parsons, born at Birr, went on to invent the steam turbine in 1884 - a single Offaly family responsible for a fundamental piece of modern astronomy and a fundamental piece of modern engineering, within fifty years.

Falmouth Kearney was an Offaly shoemaker who left the small village of Moneygall in 1850, the year after the famine. He sailed for New York. His descendants spread out across the American Midwest, settled in Kansas, and one of them, several generations later, gave birth to a daughter named Stanley Ann Dunham. Stanley Ann Dunham married Barack Obama, Sr. of Kenya. Their son was born in Honolulu in 1961. In May 2011, Barack Obama, by then the 44th President of the United States, came to Moneygall to visit the cottage his fifth great-grandfather had left. The village had spent weeks painting and tidying. The President drank a pint of Guinness in Ollie Hayes's pub, met distant cousins he had not known he had, and gave a speech to a crowd that had multiplied the population of Moneygall by a hundred. Today there is a service station on the M7 motorway just south of the village called the Obama Plaza, with a small visitor center inside. It is the only American presidential ancestral home in Ireland with its own motorway exit.

Tullamore, the county town, is the home of Tullamore Dew, the second-best-selling Irish whiskey brand globally. The original distillery opened in 1829. The brand survived prohibition, the Anglo-Irish trade war, and various corporate changes; the new distillery built in 2014 is the first to operate in Tullamore for sixty years. South of Tullamore, the village of Clara produced Shane Lowry, the golfer who won the Open Championship at Royal Portrush in 2019 - the first Offaly man to win a major. Birr is a hurling stronghold, with four All-Ireland Club hurling championships in the 1990s and 2000s. The Offaly senior football team famously won the 1982 All-Ireland with a Seamus Darby goal in the final minute - denying Kerry what would have been a historic five consecutive titles. Forty-four years later, the Offaly people of a certain age can still tell you exactly where they were standing when that ball went in.