Ballymote

The castle here was built about 1300 by Richard de Burgh, the Red Earl, and it was from Ballymote that O'Donnell marched to Kinsale in 1601. The Book of Ballymote, compiled here about 1390, carries the key to ogham that let the alphabet be read again.

Ringforts and cairns show farming around Ballymote from about 1000 BC, but the town grew from its castle: the Annals of the Four Masters record that the Earl of Ulster began the castle of Áth Cliath an Chorainn in 1300, and that it was demolished in 1317. The town was ravaged several times in the 16th century. James I granted it to James Fullerton in 1608, and it passed to the Taaffes. After Lord Shelburne bought the estate in 1753 he brought in Protestant weavers from Ulster to make it a linen town; his son Thomas Fitzmaurice built a bleach mill and workers' houses from 1774, and by 1799 most of the townspeople were weavers. Linen peaked around 1815–20 and had collapsed by the 1840s. In 1833 the town passed to the Gore-Booths of Lissadell.

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

• Heapstown Cairn · tomb · 11 km
• Ballymote Castle · castle · under 1 km
• Temple House Manor and Castle · castle · 5 km
• Markree Castle · castle · 10 km
• Ballinafad Castle · castle · 14 km

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

• Carrowkeel passage tombs · Fourteen Neolithic tombs on the Bricklieve ridges, one aligned so the midsummer sunset shines down its passage — the mirror of Newgrange, with no crowds.
• Tobernalt Holy Well · A Penal-era Mass site in a wooded glen where the priest's stone altar still stands — the well older than Patrick, the crowds still gathering on Garland Sunday.
• Creevelea Friary · The last Franciscan house founded in Ireland before the suppression — 1508, by Eóghan O’Rourke of West Bréifne and his wife Margaret O’Brian. Burned by accident in 1536 and rebuilt, dissolved about 1598, reoccupied in 1642, cleared out by the Cromwellians, and lived in again after that until 1837. A cloister carving shows Francis preaching to the birds.
• Moytura · Second Battle of Mag Tuired: the Tuatha Dé Danann against the Fomorians. Lugh of the Long Arm kills his grandfather Balor of the Evil Eye with a sling-stone through the eye.
• Knocknarea — Medb's cairn · Queen Medb stands buried upright inside, in armour, facing Ulster. Add a stone for luck — take one and she comes for it.
• Lough Gill — the Isle of Innisfree · Not myth but poem: Yeats's lake isle, where the 'bee-loud glade' and the fairy faith of Sligo gave a modern poet his oldest music.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.