Cluain Meala · Co. Tipperary
The town that put Ireland on wheels - and still makes Ireland's cider.
Clonmel sits in a bend of the River Suir with the Comeragh Mountains rising to the south and the Slievenamon plain opening to the north. It's the largest town in Tipperary, which makes it the market town, the hospital town, the court town, and the place people from smaller Tipperary towns mean when they say 'going into town'. It has a functional weight that tourist towns don't.
On 6 July 1815, an Italian immigrant named Carlo Bianconi - he went by Charles - sent an open-sided horse-drawn car out of what is now Hearn's Hotel on Parnell Street, bound for Cahir, sixteen kilometres up the Suir. That was the first scheduled public transport service in Ireland. Within thirty years, Bianconi had 1,400 horses covering over 6,000 kilometres a day across 123 Irish towns. He became mayor of Clonmel twice. His portrait is everywhere.
The town also makes cider. William Magner started pressing apples at Dowd's Lane in 1935. The English firm H.P. Bulmer bought in two years later, lent their name to the Irish market product, and moved the whole operation to a new plant at Annerville - five kilometres east - in 1965. Bulmers is what they call it here. Magners is what they call it everywhere else. The apples are still Tipperary apples.
What Clonmel doesn't have is a tourist identity with edges around it. It has a medieval core - the Main Guard, the West Gate, the remnants of the town walls, Old St Mary's Church with its 25-metre octagonal tower - and it has the kind of town-centre life that comes from being the place where actual county business gets done. Come for the history. Stay because the river walk is good and nobody's trying to sell you a leprechaun.
