Bantry

A West Cork town at the head of Bantry Bay, centred on a big square that once held cattle fairs. It was a pilchard fishing base visited by Spanish, French and Dutch fleets, and in 1796 the French fleet sent to help Wolfe Tone arrived in the bay but was beaten by the winds. On 8 January 1979 the tanker Betelgeuse exploded at the Whiddy Island oil terminal, killing 49 people.

The area claims a link with St Brendan the Navigator, and St Cannera lived here as a hermit in the 6th century; a graveyard west of the town marks a 15th-century Franciscan friary. In 1689 John Stevens called it "a miserable poor place" of seven or eight small houses. After the French expedition of 1796 failed, local landowner Richard White was made Baron Bantry in 1797 for preparing the defences, and later Earl of Bantry; Bantry House has been the White family home since 1739. In the War of Independence the Cork IRA brigades were active here and British forces firebombed buildings in the town.

The Betelgeuse explosion killed all 42 crew and seven terminal workers, and 250 jobs went; mussel farming later grew up in the sheltered water. Gulf Oil gave up the site in 1986 and the terminal now holds a third of the national oil reserve. In 1985, after Air India Flight 182 came down off the coast, Bantry looked after the victims' families, and Canada later presented a plaque in thanks.

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

• Kilnaruane Pillar Stone · high cross · 1 km
• Breeny More Stone Circle · tomb · 9 km
• Kealkill stone circle · stone circle · 9 km
• Coolcoulaghta Standing Stones · tomb · 11 km
• Carriganass Castle · castle · 10 km
• Castle Donovan · castle · 11 km

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

• Abbeystrewry famine pits, Skibbereen · Between 8,000 and 10,000 people lie in unmarked pits in this small graveyard — the town whose name became shorthand for the Famine's worst.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.