The Munster Plantation, 1587–1602
Raleigh's town
Sir Walter Raleigh was granted three and a half seigniories in Cork and Waterford in 1587 — 42,000 acres including Tallow, Mogeely, Conna and Lisfinny — for 100 marks a year. He laid out a planted town here of sixty houses, settled English tenant families, and built up an iron works and saw mills on the Bride. In autumn 1598 the Munster rebellion swept through and Raleigh's Tallow was burned. He never came back. In 1602 he sold the lot to Richard Boyle, the future Earl of Cork, for £1,500. Boyle made the fortune Raleigh had failed to.
Aonach Capall Tulach an Iarainn
The horse fair
The Tallow Horse Fair has been held on the third of September — or the following Monday if it falls on a weekend — every year since 1904. Two pandemic years aside, the run is unbroken. Horses are sold off the streets the old way, in cash, with a slap on the hand to seal a deal. By mid-afternoon the town is wedged. By evening it has emptied again. It is one of the oldest livestock fairs still going in Ireland and it is not laid on for visitors — show up, stand back, watch.
A border town that doesn't act like one
Five kilometres from Cork
The Cork–Waterford boundary runs through fields just south of Tallow, and the town has always faced both ways. The Bianconi coaches ran Youghal–Waterford through here. The N72 still does. Most people in Tallow have business in Fermoy or Youghal as often as in Dungarvan. Lisfinny Castle, the 15th-century Desmond tower house overlooking the town from the north, sits in Waterford; Conna Castle, on the same Bride a few miles upstream, sits in Cork. The river doesn't know the difference. Neither, most days, does the town.