Cill Mhíodáin · Co. Waterford
A Greenway stop, a heritage railway, and a cheese that left in 2006.
Kilmeaden is what Waterford city's commute looks like once it gets past the suburbs and remembers it is in the country. The N25 drops you down through it without slowing the traffic; the R680 takes you into the village proper, which is a crossroads, a couple of shops, a church, a pub, and a railway station that hasn't seen a scheduled train since 1967. The story is mostly what passes through - the road, the river, the railway line that became the Greenway.
The village had two claims on the national imagination and lost one of them. Kilmeaden Cheddar - the orange-skinned block in every Irish supermarket through the eighties and nineties - was made in a Glanbia plant beside the old creamery from 1965 onward. The plant closed in 2006 and the building was demolished. The brand kept the name and moved production to Ballyragget in Kilkenny; Tirlán own it now. The cheese on the shelf still says Kilmeaden. The cheese is not from Kilmeaden.
What the village still has, properly, is the Greenway and the railway that runs alongside it. The trackbed of the old Waterford, Dungarvan & Lismore line carries cyclists west to Dungarvan and east into Waterford. On the same corridor, a 3-foot narrow gauge runs a Simplex diesel and two carriages out to Carriganore and back, forty minutes, weather permitting. It is a small thing run by volunteers and it is the reason most non-locals get off the road at the Kilmeaden sign.
