Adare

Often called the prettiest village in Ireland: a nineteenth-century estate village of thatched cottages built by the Earls of Dunraven, with three medieval friaries and a castle along the Maigue.

Adare grew at a ford on the River Maigue, which is tidal this far up. The Annals of Inisfallen record in 982 that "the Tree of Mag Adar was broken". The Desmond Castle on the north bank, first mentioned in 1226, is said to have been built on an old ringfort of the O'Donovans before passing to the FitzGeralds. In the Middle Ages the town had three monasteries: the Trinitarians' only house in Ireland, founded in 1230; the Augustinian priory, founded in 1316 by John FitzThomas, 1st Earl of Kildare; and the Franciscan friary, founded in 1464. The Earls of Dunraven built Adare Manor in the 19th century and much of the estate village, thatched cottages included. In June 1996 Detective Garda Jerry McCabe was killed by the IRA during a robbery in the town.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Adare ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Dísert Óengusa, Croom · round tower · 6 km
• Croom Castle · castle · 7 km
• Carrigogunnell · castle · 10 km
• Bunratty Castle · castle · 15 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

• Grange stone circle, Lough Gur · Ireland's largest stone circle, 113 stones in a great embanked ring, beside a lake that has yielded more prehistoric finds than almost anywhere in Ireland.
• Treaty Stone, Limerick · The block on which the 1691 Treaty was supposedly signed — its promises to Catholics broken so fast that Limerick is still 'the city of the violated treaty'.
• Lough Gur — Áine's lake · The goddess Áine of Knockainey haunts its shores, and Gearóid Iarla, the earl said to be her son, sleeps in a cave here and rides out around the lake on a silver-shod white horse.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.