Ballinamore

The ford is the point of the whole place. It sits on the canal that links the Erne to the Shannon, abandoned within a few years of opening in the 1860s and reopened in 1994, so the town has had two goes at being a crossing-place.

After the 5th century the Conmhaicne settled here. The annals name the place Áth na Cuirre in 1244, when a Connacht army on its way through pulled down the hospital of St John the Baptist by the ford to bridge the flooded river, and a beam fell and killed one of their own leaders. The Battle of Magh Slécht, fought nearby in 1256, split Bréifne between the O'Rourkes and the O'Reillys. The name Ballinamore first appears in 1621, when the manor was granted to Sir Fenton Parsons, and ironworks ran here from about 1693 to 1747. The canal to Ballyconnell opened in 1860 and reopened in 1994 as the Shannon–Erne Waterway; from 1887 to 1959 the town was the hub of the Cavan and Leitrim Railway.

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

• Kiltubbrid · holy well · 10 km
• Lough Scur · tomb · 11 km
• Lough Scur · castle · 11 km

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

• Magh Slécht · ‘The plain of prostrations’, where the idol Crom Cruach stood ringed by twelve others. Patrick is said to have felled it with his crozier from the next hill, and the twelve to have been swallowed by the earth. A decorated La Tène stone found at Killycluggin is the candidate for the idol itself.
• Shannon Pot — Sionann’s well · Sionann, of the line of the sea god Lir, came to the well of knowledge for its forbidden fruit. The water rose and took her, and went on rising — it is the Shannon, and it still carries her name.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.