Cill Náile · Co. Tipperary
Coal, hurling, and a church with a Pearse pulpit.
Killenaule sits at the south-western edge of the Slieveardagh Hills, in a part of Tipperary that most visitors drive straight through on the way to Cashel or Clonmel. That's fair enough. It's a small town with two pubs and one main street. But look at what that street is carrying: a church with a pulpit carved by a man who would die in front of a firing squad fourteen years later, a heritage centre housed in a former Church of Ireland that charts three centuries of coal mining, and a GAA ground where the Robins have been testing themselves against Mullinahone and Fethard since before most European states had functioning constitutions.
The coal is the part that catches you off guard. You don't expect anthracite in Tipperary. The Slieveardagh Hills don't look like a coalfield - they look like every other soft Irish hill - but the seams run underneath them, and men dug into them from at least 1654 until the 1990s. In 1826, the Mining Company of Ireland built Mardyke, two kilometres from Killenaule, as a planned village for their workers. Offices, a police barracks, a school, rows of terraced houses. It became the first industrial mining village in Ireland, and it still exists, though the mine is long gone.
In 1848, with the Young Ireland uprising collapsing across Tipperary, the townspeople of Killenaule put up barricades across the roads to slow the military pursuit of William Smith O'Brien, who was in the area. The town has been called "Killenaule of the barricades" ever since - not by everyone, and not loudly, but the phrase is in the record books. It's the kind of detail that doesn't make the tourist board copy but makes you look at a place differently.
