Clonakilty (; ), sometimes shortened to Clon, is a town in County Cork, Ireland. The town is at the head of the tidal Clonakilty Bay. The rural hinterland is used mainly for dairy farming. The town's population as of 2016 was 4,592. The town is a tourism hub in West Cork, and was recognised as the "Best Town in Europe" in 2017, and "Best Place of the Year" in 2017 by the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland. Clonakilty is in the Dáil constituency of Cork South-West, which has three seats. History The Clonakilty area has a number of ancient and pre-Celtic sites, including Lios na gCon ringfort. Norman settlers built castles around Clonakilty, and a number of Norman surnames survive in the West Cork area to the present day. In 1292, Thomas De Roach received a charter to hold a market every Monday at Kilgarriffe (then called Kyle Cofthy or Cowhig's Wood), close to where the present town now stands. In the 14th century, a ten-mile strip of fallow woodland called (the land of the woods) divided the barony of Ibane (Ardfield) and Barryroe and reached the sea at Clonakilty Bay. Here a castle called Coyltes Castell was recorded in a 1378 plea roll. This was subsequently referred to as Cloghnykyltye, one of the many phonetic spellings for (meaning the castle of the woods, from , the Irish for stone or stone building, and meaning woods). The lands around Clonakilty were owned by Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, and it was Lord Cork ('the Great Earl') who obtained its charter from King James I in 1613, with the right to return members to the Irish House of Commons. The borough of Clonakilty returned two members from 1613 to 1801; it was disfranchised when the Act of Union came into force in January 1801. It also had a part-time judge, the Recorder of Clonakilty, who held a weekly court of Petty session. The estate lands at Clonakilty were later purchased by the Earls of Shannon, another branch of the Boyle dynasty. They remained the main landlords of the town from the eighteenth century through until the early twentieth century. During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Protestant settlers in Clonakilty fled to Bandon, and much of Clonakilty was burned by Catholic rebels. On October 1642, a Protestant force led by Lord Forbes consisting of the Scottish Lord Forbes' Regiment