Cork

Founded as a monastery by St Finbarr on the marshes where the Lee divides, then a Viking port, then a walled Norman town. The city centre is still an island between two channels of the river, which is why its main street curves like a quay — because it was one. In 1920 Cork lost two Lord Mayors in seven months and watched its centre burned by British forces; it has called itself the real capital ever since.

• Kindred Spirits, Midleton · Nine great steel feathers in a circle, honouring the Choctaw Nation's $170 gift to Ireland in 1847 — sent sixteen years after their own Trail of Tears.
• Kinsale · Christmas Eve 1601: the Gaelic order's last throw fails in a dawn attack that went wrong. Nine centuries of Ulster kingship ended here, 300 miles from home.
• Spike Island · Monastery, fortress, the largest prison in the world in the 1850s (2,300 convicts awaiting transportation), then a garrison — 'Ireland's Alcatraz'.
• The Blarney Stone · The goddess Clíodhna told Cormac MacCarthy to kiss a stone before he went to court, and he talked his way out of trouble. Another version puts it before Elizabeth I. The stone was built into the castle in 1446; the word blarney is not recorded until 1785, so the tradition is younger than the wall it sits in.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.