Athlone

The crossing of the Shannon at the very centre of Ireland, and therefore the hinge of every campaign: whoever held Athlone held the road between Leinster and Connacht. Its castle was besieged twice in the Williamite war. Sean's Bar claims to be the oldest pub in Ireland, and possibly in Europe.

Athlone is the ford of Luan, and for most of Irish history it was the key crossing of the Shannon between Leinster and Connacht. In 1001 Brian Boru brought his army up the river to a gathering here, and the next year the High King Máel Sechnaill, abandoned by his northern kinsmen, submitted to him at Athlone without a fight. In 1129 the High King Turlough Mór O'Connor built a fort on the west bank to protect a new bridge; the Normans raised a motte, and in 1210 Justiciar John de Gray built the stone castle whose twelve-sided tower still stands.

James I gave Athlone a charter in 1607. Confederate troops held it until Charles Coote took it in 1650. After the Boyne, the Jacobites under Colonel Richard Grace beat off an attack by 10,000 men in 1690, but in the siege of 1691 the Williamites stormed the town; a letter from their Dutch commander, Godard van Reede, found in a Netherlands archive in 2004, reports almost 2,000 defenders dead inside the walls.

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

• Meehambee Dolmen · dolmen · 5 km
• Bealin High Cross · high cross · 7 km
• Clonmacnoise · high cross · 12 km
• Clonmacnoise · round tower · 12 km
• Athlone Castle · castle · under 1 km
• Portlick Castle · castle · 8 km

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

• Corlea Trackway · An 18-metre stretch of the great oak road of 148 BC, preserved in a climate-controlled hall exactly where the bog swallowed it.
• Clonmacnoise · The monastic city at the crossroads of Ireland, Shannon and Esker Riada, where kings were buried and Vikings, Irish and Normans all came to plunder.
• Clonmacnoise — the ship in the air · An anchor came down out of the sky during Mass and caught in the church door; a sailor climbed down the rope to free it and began to drown in our thicker air. Watch the story grow: the annals of the 740s say only that ships were seen in the air. A dart at a salmon over Teltown comes later, the anchor and Clonmacnoise later still. By the 13th century the Norse were telling it as their own.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.