Comber

A market town at the head of Strangford Lough, named for the meeting of two rivers. The Andrews family made it a linen and grain town, and Thomas Andrews, designer of the Titanic, was born here and went down with the ship. Its whiskey was last distilled in 1953, and its early potatoes have had EU protected status since 2012.

A settlement grew up during the Scots influx of the early 1600s, about a mile south of today's centre in the townland of Cattogs, and seems to have been a small port. By the 1700s the town had moved to the present Square and become an industrial place with several mills. The Andrews family built up linen and grain processing in the second half of the 1700s, and by the mid-1800s whiskey distilling was important, led by John Miller. The town had 1,400 people in 1841. On 24 June 1845 a column to Major General Rollo Gillespie was unveiled in the Square before an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people and fifty Masonic lodges.

Thomas Andrews of the family designed the Titanic and died in its sinking in 1912. The 20th century took away much of the industry, but Comber grew as a commuter town for Belfast, from 4,000 in 1961 to 8,933 in 2001. The railway, open from the 1850s, closed in 1950, and its line is now the Comber Greenway. In 1978 the IRA bombed the La Mon restaurant, killing 12 people.

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

• Nendrum · round tower · 9 km
• Giant's Ring · dolmen · 14 km
• Drumbo · round tower · 15 km
• Sketrick Castle · castle · 9 km
• Bangor Castle · castle · 13 km

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

• Nendrum Monastery · Three concentric drystone enclosures, a round tower stump, and a sundial from around 900. Beside them, dug out of the shore, the oldest excavated tide mill anywhere in the world — tree-ring dated to 619, rebuilt in 787.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.