Most Irish towns of any age grew up around their main road. Westport grew up around its river. The Carrowbeg runs through the centre of the town, channelled between stone walls and crossed by ornamental Georgian bridges. The design is deliberate. When the Marquess of Sligo's architect, James Wyatt, was laying out the new town in the 1780s, he treated the river the way a continental city would treat a canal, lining it with trees and turning it into the spine of the street plan. Today the Carrowbeg's banks are dotted with flower boxes and pavement cafes. The Octagon, the town's central square, sits a short walk south of the river. Streets named for the Browne family's various members, Peter Street, James Street, Altamont Street, John's Row, fan out from there. Most of the original buildings remain, listed and protected. The town has aged remarkably well.

On the last Sunday in July, between fifteen and thirty thousand pilgrims gather at the base of Croagh Patrick, the 764-metre quartzite peak that rises straight out of a U-shaped glaciated valley about eight kilometres west of Westport. They climb it. Some come barefoot. The path is a seven-kilometre trail of loose scree and weathered stone, sharp underfoot even in boots, taking most people about two and a half hours up. The pilgrimage is at least fifteen hundred years old. Legend has it that Saint Patrick fasted for forty days on the summit in 441 AD before banishing snakes from Ireland, although post-glacial Ireland never actually had snakes. The summit chapel was built in 1905. The procession on Reek Sunday is led by the Archbishop of Tuam with a long crook. Some pilgrims start thirty kilometres east at Ballintubber Abbey, walking the ancient Tochar Phadraig pilgrim trail to reach the foot of the mountain before they climb. The gold discovered in the mountain in the 1980s, in commercially workable veins, was not allowed to be mined. The reek belongs to the pilgrims.

Clew Bay opens out west of Westport, and the view from the town quay is among the most extraordinary in Ireland. The eastern half of the bay is filled with drumlins, the smooth elongated mounds the last glaciers left behind. When the sea rose after the Ice Age, the lower drumlins drowned and the higher ones became islands. There are 141 named ones, scores more unnamed, a complete sunken drumlin field visible nowhere else on Earth at this scale. Boat trips run out from Westport's harbour in summer. Most of the islands are uninhabited; a few have private dwellings. Clare Island, the largest, guards the bay's entrance and was the home of Grace O'Malley, the Pirate Queen, whose castle ruin still stands above the modern landing pier. Ferries to Clare Island and Inishturk leave from Roonagh Pier, about twenty-five kilometres west of Westport, taking foot passengers only.

Westport punches above its weight musically. Matt Molloy, the flute player of The Chieftains, owns a pub on Bridge Street, and traditional music sessions break out there nightly. Other trad sessions happen in JJ O'Malleys and a half-dozen other pubs across the town centre. The whole town hosts Westival in October, an arts and literature festival that takes over the venues for a week. There is a sea-angling festival in late June and a seafood festival in September. Mescan Brewery, founded by what its owners cheerfully describe as 'discontented veterinary surgeons', runs tours up the back lane on the west side of Croagh Patrick. Lough Mask Distillery, south of Tourmakeady, produces gin, vodka and whiskey. The town has somehow built a serious tourism economy without losing the feeling of being a working Mayo town, which most of the West Coast still is.

Trains from Dublin Heuston take about three and a half hours, running via Athlone, Roscommon, Claremorris and Castlebar. There are also three connections a day between Westport and Ballina, changing at Manulla Junction for a journey of around an hour. The railway station is 500 metres southwest of town on Altamount Street. There is no direct bus from Dublin, but Bus 456 runs five times a day from Galway, taking about an hour and forty minutes. Ireland West Airport at Knock is the nearest, though it has limited flights. Most travellers fly into Dublin or Shannon and rent a car. The Great Western Greenway, a 42-kilometre cycling and walking route along the trackbed of the old Westport-to-Achill railway, starts at the quay and runs north to Newport, Mulranny and Achill Island. The trains have been gone since 1937. The path is still good.