Lurgan

A plantation town laid out by the Brownlow family on a ridge above Lough Neagh, and one of the great linen towns: the damask trade made it, and the wide main street was built for a market. It was joined to Portadown in the 1960s to make the new city of Craigavon, a plan that never quite took, and both towns kept their own names and their own minds.

Lurgan is An Lorgain, the shin — a long, low ridge. It was McCann country, lords of Clanbrassil under the O'Neills, until the Crown confiscated it in 1610 and granted it to John Brownlow of Nottinghamshire; by 1619 his son William had built a fortified house and a town of 42 houses of English families. Irish rebels took Lurgan in November 1641, and Brownlow was held prisoner until 1642.

His grandson Arthur Brownlow laid the foundations of the linen trade: by 1682 Lurgan was the biggest linen maker in the north, and by 1708 it had the north's greatest linen market. Brownlow spoke English and Irish and kept medieval manuscripts, the Book of Armagh among them, at his house. The workhouse opened in 1841, when the town's population had grown from 2,715 in 1821 to 4,677.

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

• Ram's Island · round tower · 14 km
• Lisnagade · fort · 15 km
• Tandragee Castle · castle · 14 km

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

• Lough Neagh — the flung sod · Fionn scooped up a clod of earth to throw at a Scottish giant; the hole filled with water (Lough Neagh) and the clod landed in the sea (the Isle of Man).

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.