Monaghan

A drumlin-country market town, seat of the MacMahon lordship of Oriel until its partition by English commissioners in 1591 — a rehearsal for the plantation of Ulster. The poet Patrick Kavanagh farmed this 'stony grey soil' at Inniskeen.

Monaghan shares its root with Fermanagh in the Fir Manach, a people who settled around Lough Erne. In 1591 the Dublin government hanged the chief of the MacMahons and took their territory, one of the events that led to the Nine Years' War, and in May 1595 Hugh O'Neill defeated the English at Clontibret in the north of the county. From 1801 the town belonged to the Westenra family, Barons Rossmore, whose Rossmore Castle stood on its south-western edge until the council blew up the ruins in 1974.

The Ulster Canal, built through Monaghan between 1825 and 1842, never paid and was abandoned in 1931; the railway came in 1858 and was gone by 1960. In February 1919 the staff of Monaghan asylum set up the first self-proclaimed soviet in the United Kingdom. On 17 May 1974 a loyalist car bomb outside Greacen's pub on North Road killed seven people.

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

• Rossmore Castle · castle · 3 km
• Creevekeeran Castle · castle · 12 km

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

• Navan Fort (Emain Macha) · Capital of the Ulaid and stage of the Ulster sagas — where a huge timber temple was built, filled with stones and deliberately burned around 95 BC.
• Clones · Tigernach’s 6th-century monastery. A round tower, a stone sarcophagus said to be the saint’s, and a five-metre high cross whose shaft was carved between 825 and 875 — the head added later, by other hands.
• The Yellow Ford · August 1598: Hugh O'Neill destroys an English army marching to relieve the Blackwater fort — the worst defeat England ever suffered in Ireland.
• Benburb · June 1646: Owen Roe O'Neill's Spanish-trained army annihilates Monro's Scots on the Blackwater — the greatest Irish victory of the Confederate wars.
• Emain Macha — the Red Branch · Court of King Conchobar and the Red Branch knights. From here the boy Sétanta followed the king to the smith Culann's feast, killed Culann's hound and became Cú Chulainn, 'the Hound of Culann'.
• Emain Macha — Macha's curse · Forced to race the king's horses while pregnant, Macha cursed the men of Ulster to suffer birth-pangs in their hour of greatest need — which is why one boy fought the Táin alone. The site bears her name.
• Emain Macha — Deirdre of the Sorrows · Deirdre, promised to King Conchobar, fled with Naoise; when Naoise was killed on their return to Emain, Conchobar kept her, then gave her to his killer, Éogan. She threw herself from the chariot against a rock. Later tellings have her die of grief, and in some, yew trees grew from the two graves and twined together.
• The Black Pig’s Dyke · A huge black boar tore up the ground with its tusks, and the ridge it threw up runs yet — in broken stretches across Leitrim, Longford, Cavan, Monaghan and Fermanagh. The boar is folklore; the bank is not. Timber from the Monaghan stretch dates to 390–370 BC. This pin marks one length of a very long thing.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.