Enniskillen

An island town between the two halves of Lough Erne, and therefore the gate of the west of Ulster: the Maguires held it, then a plantation castle guarded it. Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett were both schooled at Portora Royal. A Remembrance Day bomb here in 1987 killed eleven people and shifted opinion sharply toward peace.

The oldest building in Enniskillen is its castle, built by Hugh Maguire "the Hospitable", who died in 1428, as the stronghold of a branch of the Maguires; Cú Chonnacht Maguire added the watergate around 1580. Its position made it a prize for the English: they took it in February 1594, Maguire besieged it and beat a relief force at the Ford of the Biscuits, held it from 1595 to 1598, and it fell finally only in 1607.

In 1612 James I sent William Cole of Devon to build an English settlement here; by 1630 there were about 180 settlers. In 1689 Enniskillen and Derry were the centres of Williamite resistance in Ulster, and the town grew into a garrison that gave its name to two regiments, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Inniskilling Dragoons. The Remembrance Day bombing, claimed by the Provisional IRA, killed 11 people; Bill Clinton opened the Clinton Centre on the site in 2002.

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

• Portora Castle · castle · 2 km
• Monea castle · castle · 9 km
• Tullykelter Castle · castle · 10 km
• Belle Isle Castle · castle · 10 km
• Necarne · castle · 13 km

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

• Boa Island figures · Two-faced 'Janus' idols in a Lough Erne graveyard, thought to date from the Iron Age, perhaps older than Christianity in Ireland. Which god they show, nobody knows.
• Shannon Pot — Sionann’s well · Sionann, of the line of the sea god Lir, came to the well of knowledge for its forbidden fruit. The water rose and took her, and went on rising — it is the Shannon, and it still carries her name.
• Lough Erne — Érne’s flight · Érne was Medb’s lady-in-waiting at Cruachan. When something came up out of the cave of Oweynagat, she and her women ran north until the water took them, and their bodies dissolved into the lake that bears her name.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.