Mountrath

A Laois town exactly 60 miles from both Dublin and Limerick, on a river called the Whitehorse, named for the white colour its water took from the old whiskey distillery in the town centre. Charles Coote founded it in the early 17th century in wild wooded country, and it later had iron works, linen and cotton weaving. Nearby St Fintan's Well is a sycamore studded with hundreds of pennies hammered in for luck.

The Synod of Ráth Breasail was held near Mountrath in 1111. In the early 17th century the lands passed to Charles Coote, who founded the town, got it two weekly markets and two fairs in 1628, and set up linen and fustian manufacture; much of his property was destroyed in 1641. His son regained the estate and was made Earl of Mountrath after the Restoration, a title that died out in 1802. Iron was made here until the woods were used up for charcoal, and in 1837 Samuel Lewis recorded a cotton business employing 150 in the mills and about 500 weaving calico at home, as well as a brewery and an oil mill.

The Castlecoote leases forbade any ground being let for a Catholic church, so Catholics worshipped on a sandbank by a stream called The Brook. In 1794 Bishop Delany proposed a parish church; despite Lord Castlecoote's opposition, the agent Mr Hawkesworth found a site, and building began about 1795. Brigidine sisters came from Tullow to found a convent on 18 April 1809, and a new church was finished in 1867. In 2017 the Brigidines gave the convent to the people of Mountrath.

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

• 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.
• Aghaboe Abbey · Canice’s 6th-century monastery in Osraige — ‘the little field of the cow’. Burned in 1234, and again in 1346 when the shrine holding his bones and relics was destroyed. The ruin standing today is the Dominican friary raised on the site in 1382.
• 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.