The dataset was created by Land Use Consultants (LUC) and is based on The Royal Irish Academy Irish Historic Towns Atlas (https://www.ria.ie/sites/default/files/origins_of_towns_0.pdf). The Historic Towns Atlas displays towns of over 3000 inhabitants and urban district towns along with information about their origin. The Atlas was used to identify the settlements and the locations were digitised based on coordinates for the settlements. The dataset shows towns within 2 km of the coast. The Royal Irish Academy Historic Towns Atlas was used to identify historic towns. Google Earth was used to obtain latitude and longitude coordinates for each town. These were converted to a shapefile and sites within 2km of the coast were exported to create the final dataset. None