Moate

A Westmeath market town whose name comes from the Norman motte still visible behind the main street. It later became a Quaker village, which made it wealthier than similar Leinster towns, and Quaker houses and a 17th-century meeting house ruin survive. A park is named for Private Patrick Kelly of Moate, killed in 1983 trying to free the kidnapped Don Tidey.

• Bealin High Cross · high cross · 9 km

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

• Hill of Uisneach · The mythic navel of Ireland, where the five provinces met at the Catstone and the great Bealtaine fire was lit — answered by fires on hills across the island.
• Clonmacnoise · The monastic city at the crossroads of Ireland, Shannon and Esker Riada, where kings were buried and Vikings, Irish and Normans all came to plunder.
• Hill of Uisneach · Where the goddess Ériu, who gave Ireland its name, met the invading Milesians and was promised the island would bear her name forever. It has.
• Clonmacnoise — the ship in the air · An anchor came down out of the sky during Mass and caught in the church door; a sailor climbed down the rope to free it and began to drown in our thicker air. Watch the story grow: the annals of the 740s say only that ships were seen in the air. A dart at a salmon over Teltown comes later, the anchor and Clonmacnoise later still. By the 13th century the Norse were telling it as their own.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.