Ballinrobe

One of the oldest towns in Mayo, on the River Robe just above Lough Mask. St Mary's Church holds one of the largest collections of Harry Clarke stained glass, put in during 1924 and 1925. At Shoe Corner a carved pair of boots marks where country people put on their shoes before walking into town, and in 1935 the Lithuanian flyer Feliksas Vaitkus crash-landed his transatlantic plane in a field nearby.

The town is dated to 1390, and an Augustinian friary de Roba is mentioned in 1337; its restored ruins still stand. A royal patent of 6 December 1606 allowed fairs and markets, and the town became the largest in the area, with Monday markets where each street had its own trade. The Market House was rebuilt in 1752. Under the Penal Laws Fr Duffy served secretly from 1696 until he was caught in 1712 and sent to Spain. The workhouse, founded in 1839, held 2,000 people at the height of the famine; in 1847 the master, matron and doctor all died of fever, and 96 people died in one week in April 1849.

The Sisters of Mercy came in 1851, St Mary's Church was begun in 1853, and the Christian Brothers arrived in 1876. The Ballinrobe Chronicle was published from 1866 to 1903. The first Republican courts sat here in 1919 and 1920. In 1935 Vaitkus, the sixth person to fly the Atlantic solo in a single-engine plane, came down here after 23 hours in bad weather, unhurt though the plane was badly damaged.

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

• Caherduff Castle · castle · 9 km
• Aghalard Castle · castle · 10 km
• Castle Carra · castle · 10 km
• Ashford Castle · castle · 11 km

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

• Cong Abbey · Where Rory O'Connor, the last High King of Ireland, died a monk in 1198 — his kingdom already gone to the Normans.
• Ballintubber Abbey · Founded by a king of Connacht in 1216, Mass has been said here every week since — roofless for 250 years through Cromwell and the Penal Laws, never abandoned.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.