Navan

Navan stands at the meeting of the Boyne and Blackwater, where travellers could cross both rivers on the route through Meath. An Anglo-Norman market town developed here under the Nangle family, with an Augustinian abbey beside the confluence. In the later Middle Ages Navan lay on the exposed frontier of the English Pale. O'Neill and O'Donnell plundered the town in 1539, and the Irish parliament subsequently imposed a charge on ploughlands in Meath and Westmeath to pay for its walls. The abbey was dissolved in the same troubled period.