This might be the world's most epic coastal drive - here's why

Despite the thermal layers, the down puffer jacket, beanie and gloves, and the heavy wool blanket wrapped around my legs, I'm freezing. With each salt-tanged icy gust, the wind feels like it's blowing a layer of frost over my bones.

"It's called 'the lazy wind' because it blows right through you instead of around you," laughs Sean Griffin. We are in Sean's pony trap, known locally as a jaunting car, on the smallest of the Aran Islands, Inis Oirr.

Yesterday it was an entirely different story. The sun shone in a cloudless blue sky, at least for some of the morning.

We are travelling Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way, a 2600-kilometre road trip that's one of the longest defined coastal routes in the world, traversing nine counties, four seasons in one day and sometimes, it seems, time itself.

The route begins or ends, depending on which direction you choose to take, at the bottom or the very top of the island of Ireland. My husband and I are travelling anticlockwise, having rented a car in Dublin. We have an overnight stop in Belfast, then drive on to the Giant's Causeway and Ireland's most northerly point, Malin Head, before turning south.

As the crow flies, the distance from Inishowen to Kinsale is less than 400 kilometres, but the intricate coastline, with its switchbacks around inlets and peninsulas, adds considerable length (and countless photo stops) to the drive.

All along the route are Atlantic Way Discovery points, signposts to more than 170 points of interest, ranging from natural wonders to man-made remnants of Ireland's ancient history.

Like the weather, Ireland's west coast scenery is ever-changing, sometimes within a matter of kilometres. There are formidable granite mountains, deep green valleys, gorse-covered moors, bogs and strands of golden sand. The sea is mutable too, pounding at jagged cliff faces or tenderly lapping the seawalls of limpid bays.

We've pre-booked accommodation to keep us on schedule, and our first night is spent in the picturesque town of Rathmullen on Donegal's Fanad Peninsula, which juts into Lough (lake) Swilly. A gracious Georgian country house, Rathmullen House has multiple fire-warmed sitting rooms, its own kitchen gardens and a highly regarded restaurant, where we have a dinner of mussels with wild garlic veloute, duck with a blackberry jus and new-season boiled potatoes from the garden.

The following morning, the rain clears, and we drive out of town beneath a double rainbow.

In a rugged region dominated by the peaks of the Derryveagh Mountains, Glenveagh National Park is the most northerly of Ireland's national parks and covers more than 16,000 hectares. It's home to foxes, badgers, many species of local and migratory birds, as well as the largest herd of red deer in Ireland. From the visitor centre, where there are guides to the numerous hiking trails in the park, we set off on a four-kilometre walk along tranquil Lough Veagh towards Glenveagh Castle.

Originally a hunting lodge, the castle was built in the Scottish Baronial style in 1873 by John George Adair, a wealthy businessman infamous for evicting all the local farming families from the land, sending them to the poorhouse. In 1978, the last owner transferred most of the land to the park, and in 1983, the castle itself was donated to the county.

There are tours of the interior, but Glenveagh is best known for its gardens, said to be some of the finest in Ireland, featuring a vast collection of rare plants and changing seasonal displays in walled gardens. Through a gate, we take the steep one-kilometre hill walk upwards for an outstanding view of the castle, gardens and the lake.

Slieve League Cliffs, formed during the last ice age, are three times the size of the more famous Cliffs of Moher, further south, yet I'm surprised to find so few tourists here when we arrive. It was believed to be a place of pilgrimage in pre-Christian times, and the remains of an early Christian monastic site have also been found.

We park at the bottom of the cliffs and take a little bus that deposits us at the top, where sheep with thick curly coats graze. Neither of us has the nerve to tackle One Man's Path, a narrow walk along the cliff edge, so we stick to the fenced trail and the viewing platform 600 metres above the Atlantic. Below, jutting from the water, are the rock formations Giant's Desk and Chair; to the left, on Carrigan Head, a watchtower built during the early 19th century as part of a coastal defence system to guard against a French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars.

We overnight in Westport, a small, pretty town on the Carrowbeg River, where the arched stone bridges are adorned with flowers and the streets are lined with wooden shopfronts painted in primary colours. We have dinner at a modern Irish restaurant in town, then head out to enjoy some live music at Matt Molloy's, a pub in the main street owned by the eponymous Irish flautist and member of folk band the Chieftains. There's no stage, just a corner table reserved for the trio of musicians, who sit sipping their pints between numbers, playing traditional music on a variety of instruments in a tiny back room where we are crammed knee to knee.

Despite the cold, Inis Oirr (or "Inisheer") wins my heart. The Atlantic is an unprepossessing slate grey as we cross Galway Bay, the waves whipped by the wind into whitecaps. The captain skilfully manoeuvres into the pier and we disembark and set off with our overnight bags to find our accommodation at one of the island's three pubs.

Only locals are allowed to have cars here and, after checking in and perusing the map in our room, we contemplate hiring a couple of bicycles to explore the island. But we find Sean outside, with his sturdy horse Fanti and his jaunting cart, and the sudden draft of cold air is all the persuasion we need to hop in the back and tuck the blanket around our legs. We set off at a trot for a tour with the garrulous raconteur ("people love a story, no mind if it's true or not") who fills us in on the island's history and inhabitants.

Inis Oirr is like a treasure island from my childhood books. There's a semi-underground church ruin, Teampall Chaomhain, dating from the 1500s; a shipwreck from the 1960s stranded on the rocks above the high tide mark, a lighthouse, a melancholy cemetery of crumbling gravestones and the remains of a castle. We jog past the limestone dry walls that crisscross the island, enclosing small fields for the inhabitants' horses, cattle or crops. Sean offers us a nip of poitin ("Irish moonshine") and tells us about the hardships of island life, now largely relieved thanks to tourism.

Gaeilge is still the daily language of the approximately 300 permanent residents, and many pupils come from the mainland to learn it here, boarding with locals and attending the local high school. Right now, the island is starting to wind down for the season. In another month or so, the inhabitants will turn to winter pursuits of repairing the rock walls of their fields and outbuildings, planting potatoes and knitting the famous Aran sweaters, Sean says.

Driving south to County Clare, we reach the town of Doolin, most famous for the Cliffs of Moher. Running along the coast for almost 14 kilometres, they were formed more than 320 million years ago. There are walks around the clifftops and the poignant ruins of a tower, but we choose to take a boat trip to see them from below. Dark and brooding, the sheer stone cliffs draped in green have featured in movies including The Princess Bride and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and are the breeding site for many birds, including a puffin colony.

The sun makes a welcome appearance as we enter County Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula. We've taken it easy, with frequent stops for Wild Atlantic Way waypoints and a pub lunch in a quaint village. We check into our hotel, then wander the charming harbourside town of Dingle with its vibrantly-hued shops selling local crafts, galleries, bookshops and seafood restaurants.

Dingle's most famous attraction is the bay's former resident dolphin, Fungie, a lone male bottlenose who escorted boats from the fishing fleet home for more than 30 years and whose brass statue graces the harbour. There's a boat trip out past the double arms of land that shelter the bay to see the dolphins that inhabit the locality, but we forgo it for a tour and tasting at the Dingle Distillery. Making a claim to being the country's first artisan distillery, it produces a very fine triple-distilled single malt aged in oak casks that formerly held bourbon, Pedro Ximenez and madeira.

Slea Head Drive is another Dingle drawcard. The peninsula protruding 48 kilometres into the Atlantic is possibly the prettiest and most scenic piece of roadway we've driven on this trip.

It's a perfect day, the rare blue sky contrasting against the intense green of the hills and the sprays of wildflowers that proliferate on the verge. We drive past grazing sheep and through old-world one-pub villages, stopping to look at a headland that featured in a Star Wars film and the remains of Dunbeg Fort, and exploring a site of clochans, or beehive huts, ancient pre-Christian domed dwellings.

The drive officially ends at Slea Head itself, marked by a dramatic marble crucifixion scene with views to the Blasket Islands, the only landfall between here and Newfoundland, almost 3500 kilometres to the west.

Conceived and promoted as a driving route just 11 years ago, the Wild Atlantic Way, with its outstanding natural scenery, history, and centuries-old culture, is an incredible journey along Ireland's rugged west coast. The only negative, we both agree as we turn the car northward for our return to Dublin, is time. A road trip that must surely rate among one of the world's top drives needs to be savoured at a far more leisurely pace than our schedule allowed.

The writer travelled with assistance from Tourism Ireland.