Greystones

A seaside town south of Bray, named for the stretch of grey stones on the seafront between the stony North Beach and the sandy South Beach. It was a small fishing place until the railway came in 1855, a difficult piece of engineering done in consultation with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In 2008 it was named the world's most liveable community at the LivCom Awards, and it won the same award again in 2021.

A hamlet called Rathdown, beside an old castle of the Barony of Rathdown, appears on a 1712 map, but only the ruins of a chapel, St Crispin's Cell, survive. Greystones itself is first mentioned in 1795 as a 'noted fishing place four miles beyond Bray'. The railway of 1855 made the town: the station was built on the boundary between the La Touche estate of Bellevue and the Hawkins-Whitshed estate of Killincarrig, and both families developed their land. Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed, better known as Lizzie Le Blond, a mountaineer, writer and filmmaker, owned her estate from 1871 and developed Ireland's first planned housing estate, still called the Burnaby after her first husband.

Between 1885 and 1897 the townspeople campaigned for a harbour to help fishing and the import of coal. Coastal erosion in the early 20th century took fields and most of the houses on North Beach Road and forced the costly move of the railway inland. In 1968 the old Kish lighthouse foundation was added to the end of the pier. After the Second World War cars let the town spread out towards Blacklion, Killincarrig and Delgany. The railway came close to closing in the 1980s, but revived in the 1990s when the electrified DART was extended from Bray.

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

• Fassaroe Cross · high cross · 7 km
• Rathmichael · round tower · 11 km
• Brennanstown Portal Tomb · dolmen · 14 km
• Kiltiernan Tomb · dolmen · 14 km
• Kindlestown Castle · castle · 1 km
• Rathdown Castle · castle · 2 km
• Killiney Castle · castle · 14 km

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

• Glendalough · Kevin’s valley of the two lakes — a monastic city built in a place chosen for being hard to reach. He died in 618, by which time his school’s fame had already carried across Europe.
• 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.
• Glendalough — Kevin and the blackbird · A blackbird landed in his outstretched hand while he prayed, so he held it there — through the laying, the hatching and the fledging. A harsher story from the same valley has him drown a woman who wanted him.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.