Mountmellick

Quakers settled here from about 1657 under William Edmundson and turned a bog town into an industrial one: cotton, wool, breweries, tanneries and glass, with some 4,000 at work in the textile trades by 1837. They called it the Manchester of Ireland. Mountmellick embroidery, white thread on white satin jean, is said to have been begun here by Joanna Carter in 1825.

• Rock of Dunamase · A fortress on a rock over the midland plain, sacked by Vikings out of Dublin in 845. Diarmait Mac Murchada is said to have given it with his daughter Aoife to Strongbow in 1170 — a dowry that helped bring the Normans in. Cromwell’s men blew it up in 1650.
• Slieve Bloom — where Fionn was reared · Clann Morna had killed his father, so the boy Fionn was taken into these mountains and raised in hiding by two women — the poet Bodhmall and the warrior Liath Luachra. The range takes its name from Bladh, and it straddles Laois and Offaly.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.