Wexford

A Viking town taken by the first Norman force in 1169. Its narrow streets were the heart of the 1798 rebellion, when the county rose and held out for a month; Vinegar Hill above Enniscorthy was the last stand. The town holds an internationally regarded opera festival in a theatre built into its old buildings.

The Vikings founded Wexford around 800 and called it Veisafjǫrðr, the inlet of the mudflats; the Irish name, Loch Garman, is explained in the dindsenchas by a man named Garman who stole a queen's crown at Tara and drowned at the river mouth. For three centuries it was a Norse town owing little more than token dues to the kings of Leinster, until Diarmait Mac Murchada and Robert FitzStephen besieged it in May 1169 and the Bishop of Ferns talked the townspeople into terms. It got its first charter in 1318.

In the baronies of Forth and Bargy around the town, Yola, a dialect descended from the Middle English of the Norman settlers, was spoken from 1169 until it died out in the 19th century. The Knights Templar's name survives at St John's Cemetery. In the 1640s a fleet of Confederate privateers sailed from Wexford against Parliamentarian shipping, and in 1649 Cromwell's army sacked the town, killing many of its people. The United Irishmen held the town through the rising of 1798, a period that also saw the massacre of loyalists at nearby Scullabogue and executions on Wexford Bridge. Three generations of Redmonds represented Wexford in parliament.

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

• Barntown Castle · castle · 4 km
• Johnstown Castle · castle · 5 km
• Rathmacknee Castle · castle · 8 km
• Bargy Castle · castle · 13 km

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

• Vinegar Hill · 21 June 1798: the United Irish camp above Enniscorthy is stormed; the windmill stump where rebels made their stand still crowns the hill.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.