The cathedral city of Waterford, a county of itself situated on the navigable River Suir about 16 miles from the sea, could accommodate ships of ‘very large burden’, enabling it to export more agricultural produce than any other Irish port, mainly to England. S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i.

Kinross, on the western shore of Loch Leven, was the second smallest county in Scotland and united for judical purposes and as a sheriffdom with its neighbour Clackmannanshire. It had no royal burgh and Kinross and Milnathort were the only towns. It was affected between 1820 and 1832 by the enactment of the locally controversial 1827 and 1831 Leven (Fifeshire and Kinross) drainage bills and legislation for new roads and ferries linking North Queensferry with Perth and Dundee.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), iv. 409, 410; LJ, lix. 431 lxi. 451; lxiii.

A small, impoverished town in Amesbury hundred, Ludgershall was ‘in appearance a mere village’ and had ‘nothing but its situation, which is truly delightful, to excite the attention of the stranger’.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 803; Devizes Gazette, 8 Apr. 1830; PP (1833), xxxvii. 690, 691. On a visit in 1826, William Cobbett† wrote that it

Barnstaple, a seaport and market town situated at the head of the Taw estuary, had been an important distribution centre since medieval times. By the early nineteenth century it depended on a ‘steady ... perhaps not very lucrative’ coastal trade, involving corn, leather and other materials drawn from ‘an extensive and improving’ hinterland, though there was some revival of overseas trade after bonded warehouses were established in 1822. The woollen industry was in decline, but lace manufacturing had recently been introduced and many people were employed in malting and shipbuilding.

Callington, a nondescript market town in the south-east of the county, seven miles from Liskeard, consisted of ‘one broad street’ with ‘sadly neglected’ buildings. It served as a trading centre for arable and livestock farmers from ‘a wide area’, and a Pannier market was built in 1832 as the old corn market and shambles were ‘in such a dangerous state’. By 1820 yarn production had ‘almost disappeared’ from the town, but some of the inhabitants were still occupied as wool merchants and wool combers and others were employed in the nearby tin mines. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.

Devon became increasingly dependent on agriculture, pastoral farming and fishing during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the industries for which it had previously been renowned went into terminal decline. In 1700 the manufacture of serges and other coarse woollen cloths had been widely distributed in the county and formed ‘the most important branch of England’s export trade in woollens’.

East Grinstead, a small market town in the east of the county close to the border with Surrey, was said in 1823 to possess ‘no considerable trade’, what there was being ‘chiefly domestic’. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 510. According to the commissioners’ report in 1831 the borough boundary was ‘entirely unknown’, but ‘certainly not coextensive with the parish or with the town division of the parish’; it was thought ‘probable’ that it did not extend beyond the town in any direction except to the north.

Leicester, the county town, was a centre of cotton and worsted stocking manufacture: in 1831 it contained about 7,000 knitting frames giving employment to some 1,200 persons, but the trade was in general decline in this period, which was marked by severe spells of distress among the framework knitters.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1822-3), 212-13; VCH Leics. iv.

After the turbulence, intrigue and corruption of the period 1784-1812 Seaford, an insignificant resort on the Sussex coast, 13 miles east of Brighton, was comparatively though not entirely tranquil.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1832-4), 1049. From 1812 at least one seat was under the control of Charles Rose Ellis, a wealthy Jamaican plantation owner and the close friend of George Canning. Ellis, who had sat for Seaford on the now defunct Pelham interest, 1796-1806, purchased assorted properties in the borough over a period of years. J.A.

Okehampton, a small market town situated in the valley of the River Oke, close to the northern edge of Dartmoor, had been a ‘great centre’ for the manufacture of serges and other coarse woollens, but this had declined by the 1790s. Many of the inhabitants were engaged in agriculture, particularly sheep farming, and the town’s economy was otherwise ‘dependent on its markets and fairs’.