Two-Mile Borris, Buiríos Leith, Co. Tipperary

A village where someone once planned to build the White House. The real one lost.

Two-Mile Borris is named for its distance from Thurles in old Irish miles - which were about a quarter longer than their English equivalent, so the gap is really closer to 7 kilometres. The name Borris comes from the Norman word for a borough or stronghold, and the stronghold is still there: a 16th-century tower house with bartizans sitting in a farmyard on the western edge of the village, next to the ring-work site where an earlier castle may have stood. Nobody makes much of it. It is just the castle, the one you pass on the way in.

The village has a Catholic church, two pubs, a primary school, and good flat farmland in every direction. The Golden Vale begins here. The hurling tradition runs through the GAA club - Moycarkey-Borris - whose name borrows equally from this village and the one down the road. The club is one of the serious ones in mid-Tipperary, which in the county of counties is saying something.

Then there is the other story. In 2007, a Thurles-native businessman named Richard Quirke proposed building a €460m Las Vegas-style casino complex on 800 acres of land next to the M8 motorway, just outside the village. The plan included a 500-room hotel, an all-weather racecourse, a greyhound track, a golf course, a helipad, and - because apparently that wasn't enough - a full-size replica of the White House in Washington DC, to serve as a banqueting hall and wedding chapel. An Bord Pleanála granted planning permission in June 2011. Then the Minister for Justice ruled casino development out. The legislation never came. The planning permission expired in 2018. The field went back to being a field. Two-Mile Borris stayed Two-Mile Borris.