Norfolk was an agriculturally diverse county remarkable for its large and independent yeoman squirearchy. Its principal ports were King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth and elections and county meetings were held in the city of Norwich.White, Norf. Dir.
Longford produced mainly oats, potatoes and butter and had ‘scarcely any manufactures’. There were ‘few resident noblemen or gentry of large estates’ and ‘few parts of Ireland in which persons of limited income’ could ‘live cheaper or better’. The principal market towns were Ballymahon, Colehill and Edgeworthstown, and the disfranchised boroughs of Granard, Lanesborough, St. Johnstown and Longford, the venue for county elections.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.
Dysart, on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth, ten miles north of Leith and 16 miles south-south-east of Cupar, was dominated by Dysart House, the subsidiary seat of James St. Clair Erskine†, 2nd earl of Rosslyn, of Ravenscraig Castle, the owner of most of the properties and valuable coal seams nearby. The harbour and wet dock serving its coal and coarse linen trades, however, belonged to the town council, a self-elected body of 24, all resident in 1822, when 21 had property in the burgh.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), ii. 455-6; PP (1823), xv. 703; J.
Antrim, which had a population of over 300,000 by 1831, was a prosperous and mostly Protestant Ulster county on the north-east Ulster coast. There were several market towns, including the disfranchised boroughs of Antrim and Randalstown, and a number of ports, notably Ballycastle, Larne and Portrush, but Belfast was the economic epicentre of its flourishing cloth trades.S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 30-35. Except in the lively politics of its biggest borough, not much attention was attracted by elections for the county, which took place at Carrickfergus.
Huntingdonshire was almost entirely agricultural. In addition to the county town and parliamentary borough of Huntingdon, it contained the small market towns of Kimbolton, Ramsey, St. Ives and St.
Lincolnshire, England’s second largest county, was a premier area of wheat production and also had extensive grazing regions, with long wool a speciality. Only six towns (Boston, Lincoln, Louth, Gainsborough, Spalding and Stamford) had over 5,000 inhabitants and it was dominated by rural proprietors, concentrated in Holland (the south-eastern administrative division) and parts of Lindsey (the northern division).
Oxfordshire was a fertile agricultural county, with centres of manufacture at Bicester (leather slippers), Henley (silk) and Witney (blankets).Pigot’s Commercial Dir.(1823-4), 435, 437, 441, 451. The notorious and ruinous contest of 1754, which cost the protagonists over £40,000 each, discouraged further disturbances of the peace for three generations.
The extensive and populous county of Galway was one of the poorest and most agriculturally backward in the country. East of Lough Corrib, which divided it into two contrasting halves, the mainly productive ground provided reasonable returns on the small estates of the gentry, but its western half formed the inaccessible and lawless region of mountain and bog known as Connemara, which was largely dependent on its maritime resources.
Ayrshire was divided by rivers into three districts, the ‘bleak and moorish’ Carrick in the south, and the ‘predominantly lowland’ Kyle and Cunninghame in the centre and north. Agriculture in Kyle and Cunninghame had undergone ‘vast improvement’ since the 1780s and dairy farming was widespread; sheep were raised in Carrick. There were extensive coal deposits in the lowland areas, and Ayrshire became second in importance only to Lanarkshire for mining in Scotland.
North Berwick was a small castellated town and port on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, 22 miles north-east of Edinburgh. It had no guildry or incorporated crafts and was dominated by the largest proprietors, the Hamilton Dalrymples, who in the 1820s spent over £700 on improving the harbour. Its population was 1,694 in 1821 and 1,824 in 1831 and it had a council of 12.PP (1831-2), xlii. 211; (1836), xxiii.
