Belturbet

The name describes the ground exactly: the ground at one of the best crossing places on the Erne, which is why there has been a crossing here for as long as anyone has been moving through the drumlins. It sits four kilometres from the border, which has shaped it more than any of that.

Belturbet grew at one of the best crossings of the Erne. Walter de Lacy built a motte on Turbet Island in the early 13th century, and in the late 16th the O'Reillys built a castle opposite; the town was the capital of East Bréifne. In the Plantation the land went to Sir Stephen Butler, ancestor of the Earls of Lanesborough, who built a thriving town on the river trade; its Church of Ireland church, reputedly built with stone from Drumlane Abbey, was one of the first Anglican churches in Ireland.

In 1641 the Irish took the town, and more than two dozen settlers were thrown from the bridge and drowned. In March 1653 Belturbet was the last town in Ireland to fall to Cromwell. John Wesley came through in 1760 and found neither papist nor Presbyterian, but Sabbath-breakers, drunkards and swearers in abundance. On 28 December 1972 a loyalist car bomb killed two teenagers, Geraldine O'Reilly and Patrick Stanley, in the town.

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

• Drumlane · round tower · 5 km
• Finn McCools Fingers · tomb · 14 km
• Crom Castle · castle · 7 km
• Castle Saunderson · castle · 7 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.
• Clones · Tigernach’s 6th-century monastery. A round tower, a stone sarcophagus said to be the saint’s, and a five-metre high cross whose shaft was carved between 825 and 875 — the head added later, by other hands.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.