Portumna

A Galway market town where the Shannon enters Lough Derg, joined to Tipperary by a 1911 swing bridge, the largest of its age in Europe. Portumna Castle, built before 1618 by the 4th Earl of Clanricarde, was the de Burgo seat for two centuries. In 1886 Clanricarde's tenants marched with a brass band to offer a reduced rent, the start of the Land League's Plan of Campaign. The old workhouse now tells the story of Irish workhouses.

Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde, built Portumna Castle, a semi-fortified house, before 1618, and it was the main seat of the de Burgos for over 200 years until fire gutted it in 1826. Legends cling to it, among them a wolfhound called Fury said to have saved a child falling from a window, though the story is doubted. The Portumna Poor Law Union was declared on 22 February 1850, during the Famine, and its workhouse was built for 600 inmates. In November 1886 the Plan of Campaign targeted the 2nd Marquess of Clanricarde for his harsh treatment of tenants: 4,000 tenants marched with a brass band past the estate office, offered a lower rent that was refused, and handed the money to nationalist MPs. The disturbances led to the 1887 crimes act. The five-span bridge over the Shannon was completed in 1911, and the government bought the castle's forest lands in 1948.

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

• Portumna Castle · castle · under 1 km
• Terryglass Castle · castle · 3 km
• Derryhiveny Castle · castle · 5 km
• Ballyquirk · castle · 5 km
• Redwood Castle · castle · 9 km
• Lackeen Castle · castle · 10 km

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

• Aughrim · 12 July 1691: the bloodiest battle ever fought in Ireland — 7,000 dead in an afternoon after a cannonball took off the Jacobite general's head.
• Birr Castle Leviathan · The largest telescope on Earth from 1845 to 1917 — a 72-inch mirror in a midland demesne, through which the spiral shape of galaxies was first seen.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.