Portlaoise

Founded as Fort Protector in 1548 during the first plantation in Ireland, and called Maryborough for nearly four centuries after Queen Mary. It took its Irish name back in 1929. The midland motorways meet here, which has made it one of the fastest-growing towns in the country.

Portlaoise grew around the Fort of Leix, or Fort Protector, begun in 1548 under Sir Edward Bellingham to hold Laois for the English after the local chiefs were driven out; its remains still stand in the town centre, on rising ground guarded by the River Triogue and an esker called the Ridge. An act of 1557 founded the town as Maryborough, and the county as Queen's County, after Mary I. For about fifty years the settlers fought a constant low-level war with the dispossessed O'Mores and their allies, and the town was burned several times before 1600.

It was granted a market in 1567 and a borough charter by Elizabeth I in 1570, and sent two members to the Irish parliament until 1800. The Church of Ireland church on the Market Square, attributed to James Gandon, was built in 1803–04, followed by the courthouse in 1805, the county gaol in 1830 and St Fintan's Hospital in 1833. In 1929 the town was renamed Port Laoighise, later Portlaoise.

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

• Timahoe · round tower · 10 km
• Dunamase · castle · 6 km
• Tinnakill Castle · castle · 11 km

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

• 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.