Luach Mhagh · Co. Tipperary
A ruined castle, a GAA club that wins everything, and a tearoom that saved the village.
Loughmore is a small parish about 5km south of Templemore, on the flat mid-Tipperary plain between the Slieve Bloom Mountains and Semple Stadium. It doesn't look like much from the road - a ribbon of houses, a church, a school. Then you notice the tower.
Loughmoe Castle - two phases of construction, two surnames of history - has been standing in some form since the 13th century. The Purcells, an Anglo-Norman family who arrived in the train of the FitzWalters after the invasion, held this land for five centuries. They built the original tower house, then added a fortified house alongside it in the 17th century. The last Baron of Loughmoe, Nicholas Purcell, died in 1722 and the barony died with him. The Cromwellian settlement had done its work. The family that had been here since the Normans was gone. The ruin stayed.
The thing that makes Loughmore unusual now is the GAA club. Loughmore-Castleiney - two small parishes, combined population under a thousand - have won the Tipperary senior hurling championship six times, the senior football championship sixteen times, and completed the double three times (2013, 2021, 2024). In October 2025 they went back-to-back in hurling, beating Nenagh Eire Og by three points at Semple Stadium. A club from a crossroads in mid-Tipperary, competing with towns ten times their size. Nobody fully explains it. The locals don't try.
In 2012, two women - Maeve O'Hair and Mary Fogarty - noticed that Loughmore had no shop. Had had none for years. Rather than wait for someone else to open one, they formed a co-operative, found a cottage, and opened The Cottage Shop and Tearooms. The Irish Times named it the best cafe and tearoom in Ireland in 2014. McKenna's Guide followed. The shop sells local bread, jams, honey, vegetables, groceries. The tearooms do the kind of lunch that makes you stay longer than you meant to. It is exactly what a village shop should be and almost never is.