Nenagh

The county town of Tipperary lies under the Silvermine Mountains near Lough Derg, and its name recalls the great fair of Ormond once held here. Its round Norman keep, over thirty metres high and built around 1200 by Theobald Walter, the first Butler, is one of the finest of its kind in Ireland. The battlements were added in 1861, when the keep was meant to become the bell tower of a cathedral that was never built.

Ormond Lower was O'Kennedy territory before the Normans, and King John granted it to Theobald Walter, who became Chief Butler of Ireland. Nenagh Castle was the Butlers' main castle until they moved to Gowran in the 14th century. A Franciscan friary founded in 1252 became one of the richest religious houses in Ireland and lasted six hundred years; its last friar died in 1817. O'Carroll burned the town and friary in 1550. In the 1640s the castle changed hands several times, its governor George Hamilton surrendering to Ireton's forces after a short siege, and Patrick Sarsfield burned the town in 1688.

Apart from the castle and friary, most buildings date from the mid-18th century onward, after the town passed out of Butler ownership and leases were granted widely. Growth quickened in 1838, when Nenagh became the administrative capital of the North Riding, and Daniel O'Connell held one of his monster meetings for Repeal at Grange nearby. In the 19th century it was a market town with brewing, corn processing, coach building and iron works, and it suffered in the Famine. The co-operative creamery opened in 1914, and in 1934 the Irish Aluminium Company, later Castle Brand, was founded here.

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

• Ashleypark Burial Mound · tomb · 8 km
• Castle Otway · castle · 12 km

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

• The Devil's Bit · The devil bit a chunk from this mountain and spat it out — where it became the Rock of Cashel. The gap in the ridge is his tooth-mark.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.