Bray

A railway resort: when the line from Dublin reached it in 1854 it was developed as a planned seaside town on the model of Brighton, and the railway promoter William Dargan built its Turkish baths. James Joyce spent part of his childhood here.

In the Middle Ages Bray stood on the southern border of the Pale: the coast was ruled from Dublin Castle, the hills inland by the O'Tooles and O'Byrnes. It appears as Brey on Ortelius's map of 1598. William Brabazon, 1st Earl of Meath, bought the Kilruddery estate in 1627. The railway arrived in 1854, and local entrepreneurs turned Bray into a planned seaside resort modelled on Brighton, with hotels and terraces along the seafront and William Dargan's Moorish Turkish baths of 1859. It was never able to raise the money for a pier or the other big attractions it planned, and by the early 1900s it was in decline; after a brief post-war revival, cheap foreign holidays ended its resort days, though Dubliners still come out for the day.

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

• Fassaroe Cross · high cross · 3 km
• Rathmichael · round tower · 5 km
• Brennanstown Portal Tomb · dolmen · 7 km
• Kiltiernan Tomb · dolmen · 8 km
• Kilgobbin Cross · high cross · 10 km
• Rathdown Castle · castle · 5 km
• Kindlestown Castle · castle · 7 km
• Killiney Castle · castle · 7 km
• Roebuck, Dublin · castle · 14 km
• Merrion Castle · castle · 14 km

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

• Clontarf · Good Friday 1014: Brian Boru's forces break Leinster and Dublin's Vikings — and Brian is killed praying in his tent. Now a quiet seafront suburb.
• Gleann na Smól — Oisín returns · After 300 years in Tír na nÓg, Oisín came home, touched the ground helping men lift a stone, and aged in an instant — to tell Patrick the tales of the Fianna.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.