Athy

Athy stands where the Grand Canal meets the River Barrow and grew from a Norman settlement into a stronghold of the FitzGerald earls of Kildare. A garrison town for centuries, it gave more volunteers to the Great War than any other Irish town of its size. The 1903 Gordon Bennett Cup, the first international motor race held in Britain or Ireland, ran through it, and its museum has the only permanent exhibition on Ernest Shackleton, born nearby at Kilkea House.

Athy grew from a 12th-century Anglo-Norman settlement into an important stronghold of the FitzGerald earls of Kildare, who built and owned the town for centuries, and a Dominican priory was founded here in 1253. The first town charter dates from 1515. During the Confederate Wars of the 1640s the town was fought over for eight years, and cannon fire wrecked the Dominican monastery, the castles and the bridge of 1417; the present Crom-a-Boo Bridge was built in 1796. The town hall went up around 1745, the Grand Canal joined the Barrow here in 1791, and the railway arrived in 1846.

Athy was long a garrison town loyal to the Crown, and English soldiers stationed in Barrack Lane after the Crimean War did much for local trade; it sent more volunteers to the Great War of 1914–18 than any other Irish town of similar size. On 2 July 1903 the Gordon Bennett Cup passed through Athy on a circuit of Kildare roads, Ireland having been chosen because racing was illegal on British public roads. The British team raced in shamrock green as a compliment to Ireland, which is how British racing green got its name, and the Belgian Camille Jenatzy won in a Mercedes.

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

• Moone High Cross · high cross · 11 km
• Castledermot · round tower · 14 km
• Timahoe · round tower · 15 km
• White's Castle · castle · under 1 km
• Woodstock Castle · castle · under 1 km
• Rheban Castle · castle · 5 km
• Kilkea Castle · castle · 9 km

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

• Browneshill dolmen · A capstone of some 100 tonnes, the heaviest in Europe, raised by farmers without wheels or metal. Nobody is sure how.
• Dún Ailinne · The royal site of Leinster: a 13-hectare hilltop enclosure whose vast timber circles were built for ceremonies, then dismantled and burned.
• Rock of Dunamase · A fortress on a rock over the midland plain, sacked by Vikings out of Dublin in 845. Diarmait Mac Murchada is said to have given it with his daughter Aoife to Strongbow in 1170 — a dowry that helped bring the Normans in. Cromwell’s men blew it up in 1650.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.