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CLONMEL |
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CLONMEL , thirteen miles upstream from Carrick-on-Suir, is far and
away Tipperary's prettiest centre. It's a strangely genteel kind of
place and retains something of its flavour as an early coaching town. It
was the birthplace in 1713 of Laurence Sterne, philosopher and literary
comic genius, and it's not at all difficult to imagine Shandyesque
shenanigans in the fine Georgian inns around town. A hundred years later
Clonmel became the principal base for Bianconi, the most successful
coach business in the country. The company's founder, Bianconi, came
from Lombardy in Italy and ran his so-called Bians from what is now
Hearn's Hotel on Parnell Street.
The town is a beautiful place to breeze through: you can't miss
Clonmel's finest building, the sorely dilapidated Main Guard sagging at
the eastern end of O'Connell Street. The oldest public building in
Ireland, built in the classical style, it predates Dublin's Royal
Hospital, it is now undergoing full renovation. The facade visible today
was built by James Butler, first Duke of Ormond, as a courthouse for the
Palatinate of the County of Tipperary, and it bears two panels showing
coats of arms dated 1675.
Other examples of period architecture include the nineteenth-century St
Mary's Roman Catholic Church , with ziggurat tower and portico, in
Irishtown, out past the Tudor-style nineteenth-century West Gate; the
Greek Revival-style Wesleyan Church on Wolfe Tone Street; and the Old St
Mary's Church of Ireland church with its octagonal tower and tower
house. All of these are impressive from the outside; none offer much if
you venture in. The County Museum in Emmet Street (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat
10am-1pm & 2-5pm; free) records local history in a collection of maps,
newspapers, postcards and prints of Bianconi's coaches; it also has a
small gallery of fine paintings and hosts temporary exhibitions.
At Richmond Mill, opposite SuperQuinn supermarket, there's a Museum of
Transport (Mon-Sat 10am-6pm; £2.50/¬3.17) housing two rooms of gleaming
nostalgia, including Rolls, Jags and Fords from the 1930s on and a 1965
VW Karman Ghia. |
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