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Measured from the map

Explore the lakes of Ireland

3,149 named lakes, with measured outlines and nearby places to explore. 1,486 have a mapped road or path within sixty metres of the shore. Check the lake page for recorded access and any visiting restrictions.

Lough Tay, County Wicklow
A moment by the waterLough TayCounty Wicklow · Photograph from 2025
Qwertzu111111, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
3,149
named lakes
1,486
with shore a way reaches
1,026
with a car park and a routed walk
25
counties

The nearest to you

Nearest to you
View on map

Share your position and the closest lakes in the country are sorted for you. Your position is used in this browser to sort the list, and is not sent anywhere for that. Asking for directions is the exception: both ends of a route are needed to work one out, so they go to this site, in the body of the request rather than in the address, and the reply is marked not to be stored.

Where they are

Explore all 3,149 lakes on the map. Each pin sits at the main access point on the shore where one is recorded, or on the lake itself. Choose a pin to open its page.

The largest of them

County by county

County lists use the county containing the lake's mapped centre. A lake crossing a county boundary appears once, and lakes without an assigned county remain in the national list.

Questions people ask

How many lakes are there in Ireland?
This directory includes 3,149 named lakes after matching records are combined. It generally includes lakes of at least one hectare, plus smaller lakes with a Wikidata identifier. The wider place catalogue also includes smaller waters and separate mapped records. Neither is a complete census of Ireland's lakes.
Which of them can you actually get to?
1,486 of them have at least one stretch of shore with a public road or path within sixty metres. The other 1,663 do not, which may be because the ground around them is private or only because nobody has mapped the way in. This site does not tell the two apart unless somebody has checked the lake against its owner.
Where do the sizes come from?
Each area is worked out from the outline OpenStreetMap holds, by measuring the ground the outline encloses. Where Wikidata publishes a figure as well, the lake's own page shows both, because a mapped outline and a published figure are two measurements rather than one correcting the other.
Does a lake having a page mean you may swim in it?
No. Nothing here is a statement of permission. OpenStreetMap records where things are, not who may go there, so a page says what the map contains and, where somebody has checked with the owner or the council, what they said and on what day.

Outlines, names and identifiers are OpenStreetMap records. Areas, shore lengths, access points, routed walks and every distance here are this site’s own measurements from those records, last built on 2026-09-20. Where a page states what an owner or a council allows, it names them and the day somebody read their page.