Fermoy

A town on the Blackwater in east Cork that was little more than a few cabins and an inn until a Scotsman, John Anderson, bought the land in 1791 and designed the streets that still stand. He gave land to the army, and by the 1830s Fermoy's barracks were the largest military establishment in Ireland. The river is still the main draw, for salmon and coarse fishing and for two regattas a year.

The ringfort at Carntierna on Corrin hill, south of the town, was an important Iron Age site. A Cistercian abbey was founded here in the 13th century, believed to be by Domnall Mór Ua Briain, King of Thomond, and after the dissolution its lands passed to Sir Richard Grenville, Robert Boyle and William Forward. In 1791 John Anderson, the entrepreneur who started the mail coach system in Ireland, bought the lands and laid out the town. In 1797 he gave the army land to settle there; the East Barracks followed in 1806 and the West Barracks in 1809, with room in all for 2,816 men and 152 horses, and the town grew around them until 1922.

On 7 September 1919 the IRA under Liam Lynch attacked off-duty King's Shropshire Light Infantry soldiers on their way to a Wesleyan church parade, killing one and disarming the rest. When a Fermoy inquest jury would not call the death murder, about 200 soldiers looted shops owned by the jurors. On 10 August 1922, during the Civil War, anti-Treaty forces burned the barracks and other buildings as they withdrew into the hills.

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

• Labbacallee wedge tomb · tomb · 5 km
• Blackwater Castle · castle · 13 km
• Mitchelstown Castle · castle · 15 km

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