Barry Devon, Founder of Tour the Ages
I RUN ARCHAEOLOGICAL tours of Dublin and the surrounding areas, so on a typical day I'm up at 7.30am doing final checks of the day's schedule before walking in from my home in Sandymount to meet up with my group.
We meet outside the National Museum and I give them the low-down on the Dáil and 18th-century Dublin.
Group sizes range from 15 to 20 people, mainly in their 50s and 60s. They mostly come from the UK because that's the market we target, but we get Irish people too. Sometimes they realise they've travelled the world but don't know what's in their own backyard.
Most of the group will be in local historical societies, or have a general interest in archaeology. While they are inside getting a tour from museum staff, I usually nip out and make sure the bus is sorted and that everybody at the next stop is ready for us.
We walk down to Trinity College then to get a campus tour and a look at the Book of Kells. We split up for lunch, which is just as well because it can be unwieldy to arrive into a pub en masse. When we meet up afterwards we head to Dublinia, which they love because it's very interactive.
Wherever we go I'm in the lead, with my 20 chickens behind me. I don't use a raised umbrella or anything because we take it at an easy pace - they are on their holidays after all.
We finish up at the Gravity Bar at the Guinness Storehouse because the view is terrific and it gives visitors a great sense of the city.
After that they all go back to their hotel and rest up for the night before meeting up again next day to visit megalithic sites, such as Newgrange and Loughcrew, or medieval spots such as Mellifont Abbey and Trim.
It's definitely the best thing I've ever done careerwise. I used to work for Microsoft but I love the sea - sailing and surfing - and I love history, so I thought a career change into marine archaeology would combine both nicely.
I think I was looking for some sort of Jacques Cousteau experience, but it didn't work out that way because actually there's very little work in it.
In the end, I worked as a digger on a number of UK excavations. The highlight of my career was finding a first-century Roman coin embedded in a Roman road we were excavating in Exeter, which helped date it.
After a while you get fed up of digging though. It's a young, single person's life. You're not very well paid and you're always bunking in shared accommodation.
I wanted to come home so I set up Tour the Ages this summer. So far, all the people I've met have been lovely.
I tell them I can't know everything about 5,000 years of Irish history, but that I'll do my best to find out answers to any questions they have. I travel with a mobile library of books, so we learn as we go. And people share their own knowledge with the group, so it's always stimulating.
We finish up each day by about 7.30pm, so it's a long day, but it's fun - even in the rain. We're indoors quite a bit and when we aren't, everyone is advised to bring rain gear and walking boots, so it doesn't put people off. In any case, people don't come here for the weather, do they?