Hurling and Gaelic Games

Hurling is played with a short ash stick and a hard leather ball, in the air as much as along the ground, at a speed that takes some getting used to, and it sits on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. Gaelic football is the other half of the same organisation, more widely played and easier to follow first time out. Both are amateur at every level, including the county teams who fill Croke Park in Dublin through the summer championship, and players line out for the county they come from. Camogie is the women's hurling code. The everyday version is a club match on a Sunday in a field with a wall around it.

What you actually see

• A club match - the ordinary version, in a parish ground, for a few euro.
• Croke Park - championship matches in front of a full stadium.
• The hurley and sliotar - the shaped ash stick and the hard leather ball.
• County colours - the jerseys and flags that mark out where people are from.

When to go

The intercounty championship runs through late spring and summer and finishes with the All-Ireland finals in high summer at Croke Park. Club matches happen most weekends from spring into autumn and need no planning at all. Final tickets go through clubs and county boards rather than open sale, so aim for a league or club game instead.

Honest expectations

The rules are not obvious and nobody will stop to explain them; hurling in particular looks like chaos for the first twenty minutes. Tickets for the big days are genuinely hard to get and the resale market is unreliable. Stadium tours are a poor substitute for a match, and small grounds offer basic facilities and no shelter from rain.

Nearby

Croke Park sits northeast of Dublin city centre; club grounds are everywhere else.