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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; GBP2.50/?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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