Borrisokane
Buiríos Uí Chéin, Co. Tipperary

A cattle-market town on the road to Lough Derg - and Barry Lyndon grew up here.

Borrisokane is a north Tipperary market town that doesn't try to be anything else. The name - Buiríos Uí Chéin, the burgage of the Cianacht - points back to the Gaelic lords who held this land before the Normans arrived and the Cromwellians after them. The town you see today was largely laid out by the plantation settlers in the late seventeenth century: a wide main street, a fairgreen, a mill on the river. The bones are still there.

The Ballyfinboy River is the town's quiet fact. It rises somewhere near Moneygall, runs through Cloughjordan and Borrisokane, and finishes in Lough Derg 12 km to the west. That proximity to the lake is worth knowing - Borrisokane is a cheaper base for Lough Derg than Dromineer or Terryglass, and the drive in is fifteen minutes of north Tipperary countryside.

The town has one main food-and-drink destination that has been there for over a century: The Green 1918 on the Fairgreen. Chef-led, locally sourced, music on Wednesdays and weekends. It is not a discovery - it is simply a good pub restaurant that got old and kept its standards. Everything else you need to know about Borrisokane you'll find out by asking the person next to you at the bar.

One more thing: Andrew Robinson Stoney-Bowes grew up at Greyfort House in the parish. He married a countess by faking his own mortal wound on a stretcher and then spent years terrorising her. Thackeray heard the story, wrote it up as The Luck of Barry Lyndon, and Kubrick made the film. The house is long gone. The story travels well.