Roscrea

One of the oldest towns in Ireland, grown around St Crónán's monastery on the ancient road called the Slighe Dala. It is a designated Heritage Town, with a 13th-century castle, Damer House, a Romanesque church gable, a 12th-century high cross and a round tower that lost about 6 m when snipers used it in 1798. The 8th-century Book of Dimma, from the monastery, is in Trinity College Dublin.

St Crónán founded his monastery in the late 6th century, and the place became an important church centre and briefly a diocesan see in the 12th century before it was absorbed into Killaloe. King John is credited with a castle here in 1213, rebuilt in stone between 1276 and 1281, and the town grew around it. In 1315 Edmund Butler, Earl of Carrick, was granted the castle and manor, and the Butlers held it until 1703, with long spells of O'Carroll control. The O'Carrolls founded a Franciscan friary about 1477, suppressed in 1579. Owen Roe O'Neill took the castle in 1649 and Cromwellian troops recaptured it in 1650.

John Damer bought the town in 1722 and built Damer House inside the castle walls, and by 1811 it was a garrisoned barracks. John Wesley preached here on 26 June 1750. In 1812 most of the Romanesque church was pulled down for the stone to build St Cronan's. The workhouse took its first admissions in May 1842, and many famine dead were buried behind it. The estate was sold off from the mid-19th century, much of it to R.S. Palmer in 1859 and 1860, and much of the modern town dates from then.

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

• Roscrea · round tower · under 1 km
• Timoney Stones · tomb · 8 km
• Seir Kieran · round tower · 13 km
• Roscrea Castle · castle · under 1 km
• Ballaghmore, County Laois · castle · 7 km
• Leap Castle · castle · 8 km

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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.