Midleton

An East Cork town on the Owenacurra that takes its English name from being the midway town between Cork and Youghal, and its Irish name from a Cistercian abbey founded at a weir in the 1180s. It is best known for whiskey: the Old Midleton Distillery, founded in 1825, has the world's largest pot still, and the New Midleton Distillery makes Jameson, Redbreast and Paddy. A steel sculpture in Bailick Park honours the Choctaw people's famine relief gift of 1847.

In the 1180s Normans under Barry Fitz Gerald founded an abbey at a weir on the river for Cistercian monks from Burgundy, known as Chore Abbey, and the Church of Ireland church of 1825 stands on its site. The town was incorporated as a market town and postal depot in 1670 by a charter of Charles II. Alan Brodrick, Speaker and Lord Chancellor, became Baron and Viscount Midleton in 1715 and 1717, and the Market House, now the library, was completed in 1789. James Murphy founded the distillery in 1825; it joined the Cork Distilleries Company in 1868, worked until production moved to a new plant in 1975, and reopened as a visitor centre in 1992. A monument on the main street remembers IRA men killed in 1921, most of them in a failed ambush at nearby Clonmult on 20 February.

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

• Cloyne Round Tower · round tower · 7 km
• Barryscourt Castle · castle · 6 km
• Ballymaloe House · castle · 9 km
• Belvelly Castle · castle · 9 km
• Penn Castle · castle · 12 km

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

• Spike Island · Monastery, fortress, for a few years in the mid-19th century probably the biggest prison in the British Empire, holding convicts awaiting transportation, then a garrison — 'Ireland's Alcatraz'.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.