Kilrush

The port at the mouth of the Shannon, and a place the Famine is written into: and where the Vandeleur estate's evictions of the late 1880s became notorious. Scattery Island, with its round tower, lies offshore.

Kilrush has existed since at least the 16th century, and an older church ruin in the graveyard suggests longer; the name is thought to mean the church of the wood. The Vandeleurs, a family of Dutch origin, settled here about 1656 and became the chief landlords of West Clare, and it was John Ormsby Vandeleur who laid out the town in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, building Kilrush House and the town hall in 1808; many street names come from his family. With the Scot James Paterson, who ran a steamer to Limerick by 1817, he made Kilrush a busy port.

The Famine, evictions, fever and cholera cut the population of south-west Clare so deeply that it never recovered, and in the late 1880s the Vandeleur name became a byword for eviction. The West Clare Railway helped the town recover. St Senan's monastery on Scattery Island, with one of the oldest and tallest round towers in Ireland, is 15 minutes away by boat.

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

• Inis Cathaigh · holy well · 5 km
• Scattery Island · round tower · 5 km

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

• Scattery Island · A monastic island with a round tower, a Viking base, a 19th-century pilots' village — all empty since 1978, in the mouth of the Shannon.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.