Ballyshannon

A town at the southern end of Donegal, chartered in March 1613 and built on the steep bank of the Erne where it widens into a long sandy estuary. Tradition places the grave of the high king Aed Ruad on the hill now crowned by St Anne's church. In 1775 a traveller rated its salmon-leap at Assaroe above the Giant's Causeway, but the falls were lost to a hydroelectric scheme in the 1950s.

Excavations have found Neolithic and Bronze Age remains, gold sun-discs from around 2500–2150 BC, and a medieval church and cemetery of hundreds of burials thought to date from 1100 to 1400. St Anne's church is supposedly built over the grave of Aed Ruad, high king of Ireland, on Mullaghnashee, the fairy mound of Red Hugh, where excavation in 1906 found underground chambers. The annals record Vikings using the Erne to raid inland from the 9th century. James I incorporated the town as a borough in March 1613. In 1775 Richard Twiss praised the salmon-leap of Assaroe as a sight unmatched anywhere, and around 1793 the young Robert Stewart, later Lord Castlereagh, reportedly saw 'the radiant boy' rise from the fire in the old barracks.

The Enniskillen and Bundoran Railway reached the town in 1868, but partition made its only rail link run through Northern Ireland, and the line closed in 1957. In the 1950s the Cathaleen's Fall hydroelectric station brought engineers and a decade-long boom; the riverbed was lowered through the town, and the old waterfalls, Assaroe among them, disappeared into a narrow channel. During the Second World War the British and Irish governments quietly agreed the 'Donegal Corridor' between Belleek and Ballyshannon for RAF flights out to the Atlantic, used by the aircraft that found the Bismarck.

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

• Ballyshannon Castle · castle · under 1 km

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

• Boa Island figures · Two-faced 'Janus' idols in a Lough Erne graveyard, thought to date from the Iron Age, perhaps older than Christianity in Ireland. Which god they show, nobody knows.
• Lough Derg (St Patrick's Purgatory) · A cave Patrick was said to have seen Purgatory in, medieval Europe's most famous pilgrimage; pilgrims still fast barefoot for three days on the island.
• Benbulben — Diarmuid's death · End of the great elopement: Diarmuid, who fled with Gráinne from Fionn, is gored by the enchanted boar here, and Fionn lets the healing water run through his fingers.
• Glencar — the stolen child · Yeats put this waterfall into a poem in 1886 and the faeries came with it: they call a child away from a world too full of weeping. It is a made thing, not an old story — but people have been coming to look at the water because of it for well over a century now.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.