It's a long way to Tipperary - so said the marching song, sung by British regiments across the muddy fields of the First World War. The song's writer, Jack Judge, had never been there, but his grandparents had, and that was apparently enough. Tipperary has that quality. People who left it generations ago still carry the name. Inside Ireland, this is the Premier County, the only place in the country to have won an All-Ireland title in every decade since the 1880s. It is also Ireland's largest inland county, the only one with no coastline, and it borders eight others - more than any county on the island.
Tipperary occupies the centre of Munster, in the great central plain of Ireland, but the landscape is not as flat as that description suggests. The Galtee, Knockmealdown, Silvermine, and Arra ranges break the horizon in different quarters. Galtymore, the highest peak in the county, rises to 917 metres on the southern border, and from its summit the Glen of Aherlow opens westward like a long green corridor. Most of Tipperary drains into the River Suir, which rises at the Devil's Bit in the north and runs south-east toward Waterford. The northwest border follows the River Shannon. In the middle of it all lies the Golden Vale, a stretch of limestone-fed pasture that overflows into Limerick and Cork - and that is, by a comfortable margin, some of the richest farmland in Ireland.
Thomas Davis, the editor of The Nation in the 1840s, gave Tipperary the nickname that stuck: the Premier County. He meant it as a tribute to the place's fierce nationalism - 'where Tipperary leads, Ireland follows,' he wrote. The Gaelic Athletic Association itself was founded in Thurles in 1884, and Tipperary's hurlers have since collected 29 All-Ireland titles, third only to Kilkenny and Cork. Hurling here is something close to inheritance. The Slievenamon song, by Mullinahone's Charles Kickham, is the unofficial anthem at fixtures, and on big match days the blue-and-gold flags hang from every other window between Cashel and Carrick. Tipperary is also one of the rare counties to have produced an Olympic gold medallist in track and field - Tom Kiely won the all-around in St. Louis in 1904.
Outside the county boundary, what Tipperary is most famous for is bloodstock. Coolmore Stud near Fethard is the largest thoroughbred breeding operation in the world, and the rolling limestone country between Cashel and Clonmel sustains some of the highest land prices in rural Ireland - because grass grown on this soil grows fast horses. Three racecourses operate within the county: Tipperary, Thurles, and Clonmel. The hurleys, meanwhile, are still cut from ash. Down at the southern edge, around Clonmel, the economic landscape changes character: Bulmers cider brews there, and Merck's pharmaceutical works employ many of the same families whose grandparents commuted in for the creamery. Tipperary's other modern export is the Collison brothers, John and Patrick, born in Dromineer and now running Stripe.
Long before Norman lords arrived, the Eóganacht kings ruled most of Munster from the Rock of Cashel - a limestone bluff still the most photographed silhouette in the county. After 1210 the new English administration carved Tipperary out of the old sheriffdom of Munster. In 1328 the king granted it to the Earls of Ormond as a county palatine, almost a small kingdom in itself. The 1647 sack of Cashel left more than a thousand civilians dead and remained the worst single atrocity of the Confederate Wars. By 1838 the county was split into ridings - North and South - mostly because Clonmel, the county town, sat too far south for the jurors of the north to reach comfortably. The two halves were reunited only in 2014. Modern Tipperary still carries the marks of all of that: medieval castles at Cahir and Nenagh, the Norman Athassel Priory, the Holy Cross Abbey, and 3,159 named townlands divided across 199 civil parishes.
Tipperary has scattered more sons and daughters across the world than any one county has reasonable claim to. Thomas MacDonagh, one of the seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation, was born here. So was Dan Breen, the IRA volunteer turned Dáil deputy. Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, was born in Clonmel in 1713. Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, the Clancy Brothers, the singer Una Healy, the actor Kerry Condon - all Tipperary. So was Adi Roche, founder of Chernobyl Children International. Daniel Hough, an Irish soldier from the county, is officially recorded as the first man to die in the American Civil War, accidentally killed by a misfiring cannon at Fort Sumter. From the Premier County, in other words, the long way back is never quite as long as the song suggests.
County Tipperary covers Ireland's south-central interior, roughly between 52.3°N and 53.2°N, 7.5°W to 8.4°W. From cruising altitude, look for the broad green Golden Vale running south-west to north-east, bounded by the Galtees and Knockmealdowns on the south, the Slieve Bloom and Devil's Bit on the north. The Suir threads through the middle. Two motorways - the M7 across the north, the M8 down the centre - are visible reference lines. Nearest airports: Shannon (EINN) on the Limerick border to the north-west, Cork (EICK) to the south, Waterford (EIWF) just outside the south-eastern corner. No coast; this is Ireland's largest landlocked county.