Clonmel is the largest town in County Tipperary, set in the Suir Valley with the Comeragh Mountains rising to the south. The name comes from the Irish "Cluain Meala" — meadow of honey — and the setting lives up to it: if you arrive from the direction of Cashel, the town rolls out below in one of the most panoramic views of green Irish landscape you will find.
The town has a long history as a market centre and was the last place in Ireland to hold out against Cromwell in 1650. The Main Guard, a seventeenth-century courthouse on the main street, is one of the few surviving public buildings from that era. Clonmel is also the birthplace of Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, and the place where the Italian entrepreneur Charles Bianconi launched Ireland's first public transport system — a network of horse-drawn coaches — in 1815.
The surrounding countryside is excellent for walking, particularly in the Comeraghs and the Nire Valley to the south. The Tipperary Museum of Hidden History opened in 2020 and gives good context for the region's layered past.