Cloch an Mhíle
The stone that named a place
Most Irish crossroads accumulate a name over generations - a family, a saint, a battle, a deed. Milestone got its from a piece of cut stone at the roadside that told passing coaches the distance to the next town. The Irish name, Cloch an Mhíle, is a literal translation: stone of the mile. It is one of the more straightforward place-names in a county that otherwise runs to mythology and ambiguity. The milestone predated the settlement; what grew up around it grew because the marker was already there, at a junction where the road to Nenagh broke away from the road to Limerick.
The mountains and the thin soil
Upperchurch parish and the hill country
Milestone falls within the parish of Upperchurch, which climbs the Slieve Felim range and looks down toward the Golden Vale on the far side. The wider hill country holds some of the oldest archaeology in Tipperary - Bronze Age and earlier sites scattered across the commons. In the Famine years the higher hill parishes of north Tipperary were among the worst affected: the higher you were, the thinner the soil and the further the town. Roads like the R503 through Milestone were walked by people going somewhere else, usually Nenagh, looking for work, food, or a passage out.
Upperchurch, Thursday nights only
Jim of the Mills, just up the road
The drink and the music are not in Milestone itself - they are a few kilometres on, in the parish village of Upperchurch, where the Ryan family open the door of Jim of the Mills one night a week. On a Thursday the flag-stoned kitchen and the parlour fill with musicians and the kind of trad session that people drive a long way for. It is not a tourist pub dressed up to look like one; it is a working farmhouse that becomes a session room once a week. If you are staying anywhere near Milestone on a Thursday, this is the reason to be here.