Forty years of meetings
The Tidy Towns dynasty
Stradbally has been entering the National Tidy Towns competition since the early 1980s. The village took silver in 2002 and went on that summer to win gold in the European Entente Florale — the first year both Irish entrants reached gold. The national gold-medal scores followed: 2019, then a run in 2022, 2023 and 2024 with the score climbing each year (national overall winners those years were elsewhere). Forty-odd years of weekend mornings with a strimmer and an evening with a clipboard. The flowers are the visible bit. The minutes are the actual work.
Volcanic rock, copper mines, a Geopark
The Copper Coast
The coastline from Tramore to Dungarvan is a stripe of 460-million-year-old volcanic rocks and shales — the same Iapetus-Ocean geology that built the Lake District in England. Copper was mined here in the 19th century, mostly out of Bunmahon, leaving a coastline of engine houses, shafts, sea stacks and blowholes. The area was declared a European Geopark in 2001, joined the UNESCO Global Geoparks Network in 2004, and was confirmed as a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2015. Stradbally sits at the western end of the run.
The big house up the road
Woodhouse and the Beresfords
Woodhouse, just outside the village, is the demesne that built Stradbally. The original house dates from the early 1600s, was damaged in the 1641 Rebellion, and passed through the FitzGerald and Uniacke families before coming to the Beresfords through Frances Constantia Uniacke's 1844 marriage to George John Beresford. The Beresfords held the lands and the village for over a century — and the estate stayed in the family until 1971, when it was sold outside the line for the first time in 250 years. The walled garden and the gate lodges are still there. The river Tay runs through the grounds and out to the cove.