Honey Meadow. That is what the name means in Irish - Cluain Meala - and the soil really is that rich. Clonmel sits in the valley of the River Suir between the Comeragh Mountains and the Golden Vale, the county town and the largest settlement in Tipperary. The story Cluain Meala usually tells about itself, though, is one of resistance. When Oliver Cromwell brought the New Model Army to its walls in May 1650, he expected a sack like Drogheda and Wexford. He got the worst defeat of his Irish campaign instead. Inside the walls, the Ulster general Hugh Dubh O'Neill was running out of ammunition; the townspeople were said to be firing silver bullets. He held the breach long enough to slip out under cover of darkness with his garrison intact.
The medieval town was protected by walls, a small fragment of which still stands near Old St. Mary's Church on the hillside above O'Connell Street. The church itself goes back to the 14th century or earlier; it was fortified in its time, partly because Clonmel was strategically important first to the Earls of Ormond and later to the Earl of Kildare, and partly because such churches needed to be. Three gates pierced the walls - North, East and West - while the south side was defended by the Suir and the wooded slopes of the Comeraghs beyond it. The West Gate today is a 19th-century reconstruction, an open arch giving onto the town's main street. Under a 1608 charter from James I, Clonmel became a free borough; the present ceremonial sword, of Toledo manufacture, was donated by Sir Thomas Stanley in 1656 and is still carried in front of the mayor.
Cromwell arrived in May 1650 and spent weeks battering the walls with cannon. When the breach opened, his soldiers came through it confident of a quick victory, but Hugh Dubh O'Neill had built earthworks behind the gap and channels of fire to funnel the attackers into a killing ground. The losses on the English side were enormous - estimates range from 1,500 to 2,000 dead in a single afternoon, the highest single-day toll of Cromwell's Irish campaign. That night O'Neill led his soldiers and the camp followers quietly out of the town, judging further resistance impossible. The next morning, 18 May 1650, Mayor John White surrendered Clonmel on good terms - Cromwell still not knowing the garrison was gone. When he learned the truth he was furious, but he had given his word, and the town was not put to the sword. Four years later the Augustinian friar William Tirry was hanged at Clonmel after being betrayed for a five-pound bounty. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1993.
In October 1848, after the failed rising near Ballingarry, the leaders of the Young Ireland movement were brought to Clonmel courthouse to stand trial. The case drew journalists from across Britain and Ireland for weeks. William Smith O'Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence MacManus and Patrick O'Donoghue were all found guilty of treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered - the last time that sentence was handed down in Ireland. The Grand Jury foreman, R.M. Southcote Mansergh, asked publicly that O'Brien be spared. The sentences were commuted to transportation for life to Van Diemen's Land. Meagher escaped from there to America, joined the Union army in the Civil War, became a Brigadier-General, and eventually served as Governor of Montana. A failed plot to rescue the prisoners from Clonmel in November 1848 led to a separate group of seventeen armed rebels being arrested at a place called The Wilderness.
On 28 May 1912, three men met in Clonmel - James Connolly, James Larkin, and William O'Brien - and founded what is now the Labour Party of Ireland. They wanted a political wing for the Irish Trades Union Congress, and they chose Clonmel for the inaugural conference partly because it was midway between the union strongholds of Dublin, Cork, and Belfast. Connolly would be executed four years later for his role in the Easter Rising; Larkin would be jailed in America for syndicalist agitation; O'Brien would go on to lead the Irish TUC for decades. The Labour Party itself is the oldest continuously-operating political party in Ireland. In November 2015, Clonmel hosted the first marriage between two men in Irish history, following the constitutional referendum that legalised same-sex marriage. The town has a way of being present at hinge moments.
Modern Clonmel runs across both banks of the Suir but lives mostly on the north side. The Comeraghs rise to the south and Slievenamon to the north-east; everything in between is the rich pasture of the Golden Vale. Bulmers Irish Cider is brewed just east of the town, and Merck & Co. runs a major pharmaceutical operation nearby. The Suir floods the town in big rainfall years - the worst on record was 1946 - and a multi-phase flood defence completed in stages since 2007 has begun to keep the worst of it at bay. The Sean-nós song Príosún Chluain Meala was composed inside the town's jail in the 18th century by a Whiteboy named O'Donnell, who knew on the day he wrote it that he would hang the following Friday. The lyric has lasted longer than any of his judges. Old St. Mary's, the West Gate, the courthouse where O'Brien stood in the dock - all still on the same streets they were on then.
Clonmel sits at 52.36°N, 7.70°W in southern County Tipperary, on the River Suir between the Comeragh Mountains and the Golden Vale. The N24 Limerick-Waterford road runs along the river valley. From the air, look for the broad green Suir valley with mountains rising sharply to the south, the town spread mostly on the north bank, and Slievenamon's distinctive cone shape north-east of the town. Nearest airports: Waterford (EIWF) about 45 km east, Cork (EICK) about 80 km west-south-west, Shannon (EINN) about 100 km north-west.