New Birmingham, c. 1800
Vere Hunt's plan
Vere Hunt - later Sir Aubrey de Vere Hunt - owned land in the Slieveardagh Hills and knew the coal was there. His idea was not just to mine it but to build, from nothing, an industrial village to house and employ the people who would extract it. The model in his mind was Birmingham, England: the workshop of the world, a city purpose-built around industry. He named his Tipperary settlement after it. The gap between the model and the reality - one is the second city of England; the other is a crossroads in the south Tipperary hills - has always been part of what makes the story worth telling.
Private currency, public contempt
The tokens
To run a closed economy in his planned village, Hunt issued his own tokens - private coins stamped with his name. The practice was known in industrial Britain: company towns, company stores, company money. In rural Tipperary in the early 1800s, it carried a particular edge. A worker paid in Hunt's tokens could only spend them where Hunt's writ ran. When the venture contracted, the tokens became worthless. They survive now as curiosities - small copper coins that document how far a landlord's ambition can outrun his tenants' interests.
Slieveardagh after Hunt
The coal that kept coming back
Hunt's particular scheme wound down, but the coal stayed in the ground and the ground kept attracting investors. The Mining Company of Ireland opened collieries in the Slieveardagh Hills in 1826, building the planned village of Mardyke near Killenaule as Ireland's first industrial mining village. Mining continued intermittently in the area - under various operators, with varying success - well into the twentieth century. The last pits in the broader Slieveardagh field closed in the early 1990s. New Birmingham sits in that same geology, a reminder that the hills here were once taken seriously as an industrial prospect.