Wicklow

The county town wraps around its harbour, with Wicklow Head, the most easterly point of the Republic's mainland, just to the south. Vikings set up a base at the harbour in the mid-9th century and gave the town its English name. The gaol of 1702 is now a heritage centre, and the town remembers Billy Byrne, a 1798 leader executed nearby, and Captain Robert Halpin of the cable ship Great Eastern, born here in 1836.

A Bronze Age cooking pit and hut site found during bypass works in 2010 has been dated to about 900 BC. Ptolemy's map, dating back to 130 AD, places a tribe called the Cauci or Canci in the area. In the mid-9th century Vikings set up a base at the natural harbour. After the Norman invasion Wicklow was granted to Maurice FitzGerald, who built the Black Castle on the coast south of the harbour. The O'Byrnes, O'Tooles and Kavanaghs briefly held it in the 1641 rising, and Sir Charles Coote's troops then slaughtered townspeople; local oral history says people were burned to death in a building in what is still called Melancholy Lane.

The ruined Franciscan friary, founded in 1252 and dissolved in 1551, is the oldest surviving building in the town proper. The Town Hall dates from around 1690 and the gaol from 1702, and the gaol remained a place of execution until the end of the 19th century. Billy Byrne, a leader of the 1798 rebellion, was executed at Gallows Hill near the town that year and has a statue in the square. The East Breakwater was built in the early 1880s by the Harbour Commissioners and the north groyne was finished around 1909.

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

• Castletimon Ogham Stone · ogham stone · 9 km

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

• Glendalough · Kevin’s valley of the two lakes — a monastic city built in a place chosen for being hard to reach. He died in 618, by which time his school’s fame had already carried across Europe.
• Glendalough — Kevin and the blackbird · A blackbird landed in his outstretched hand while he prayed, so he held it there — through the laying, the hatching and the fledging. A harsher story from the same valley has him drown a woman who wanted him.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.