Launceston, a market town with ‘somewhat narrow and irregular’ streets, was situated on the side of a hill near the River Tamar, on the London to Land’s End road in the east of the county. Its trade was ‘not of a particular or important character’ and the manufacture of serge cloth for the East India Company, which had ‘employed about 300 hands’ early in the nineteenth century, was ‘passing into nothingness’ by the 1830s.
Tipperary, noted for its ‘depressed and turbulent peasantry’, had an ‘extensive’ export trade in agricultural produce, particularly butter and other dairy products, but apart from one cotton factory was ‘wholly devoid of manufactures’. There were several market towns, including the disfranchised borough of Fethard, the parliamentary seats of Cashel and Clonmel, the venue for county elections, and Cahir, Carrick-on-Suir, Thurles and Tipperary. Dod’s Electoral Facts ed. H. J. Hanham, 313; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.
Clonmel, a ‘prosperous’ crossing point on the banks of the navigable River Suir, connected by bridges to an island (Long Island), straddled the border between counties Tipperary to the north and Waterford to the south. There was a considerable export trade in corn and an ‘extensive’ cotton manufactory employing about 200 operatives. The streets were paved and from 1824 the town was lit by gas.
Buckinghamshire was predominantly agricultural, with an emphasis on dairy farming, but was noted for the manufacture of lace, straw plait (both declining in this period), paper and furniture. It contained six parliamentary boroughs and nine other market towns. A 50 per cent increase in population between 1801 and 1831 and the post-war slump created much distress at the lower end of the social scale. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 147; (1830), 69; PP (1833), xxxvi. 34-35; R.W.
Of the populous and prosperous commercial centre and port of Newry, straddling the county boundary between Armagh and Down at the head of Carlingford Bay, John Curwen* observed that it ‘has the appearance of opulence, and in the pursuit of trade and business many appeared to be earnestly engaged’, while another traveller, Henry Inglis, noted that this ‘respectable-looking town ... enjoys the rare distinction of having no wretched suburbs dragging their miserable length from every outlet’.J.C. Curwen, Observations on State of Ireland (1818), ii. 328; H.D.
Ross-shire, a large and sparsely populated Highland county, extended across the width of Scotland from its east coast, between Dornoch and Moray Firths, to the Atlantic in the west, between Loch Enard and Loch Alsh. The Outer Hebridean island of Lewis belonged to it. Only a small portion was under cultivation, but its eastern glens contained some fine agricultural land, which was exploited with improved techniques from the late eighteenth century. Whisky distilling and salmon and sea fishing were its other principal sources of employment.
Bere Alston, a small village covering an area of some ten acres in the south-west of the county, relied for employment mainly on the neighbouring tin and silver-lead mines, but it was reported in 1831 that the male population had fallen from about 400 to 200 in the past decade as a result of mine closures. Ibid. (1831-2), xxxvi. 37; White’s Devon Dir.
Plympton Erle, a small stannery and market town situated in a valley close to the River Plym, about five miles north-east of Plymouth, consisted of ‘four small streets, with a few respectable dwellings in the suburbs’. Its trades, such as tanning, brewing, wool combing and hat making, had all died out by 1800 and the weekly market was in decline, leaving nothing to distinguish the town economically. Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1830), 255; White’s Devon Dir. (1850), 552-4; J.B. Rowe, Hist. Plympton, 383-8; W.
Middlesex, whose ‘independent’ freeholders had famously returned John Wilkes in 1769 and Sir Francis Burdett* in 1802, was an increasingly urban metropolitan county, bounded by the Rivers Thames, Lea and Colne. Described by William Cobbett† in 1822 as an ‘ugly county’, characterized by the ‘tax eaters’ showy tea-garden-like boxes’ and the ‘shabby dwellings of [the] labouring poor’, its only hunt, the ‘Old’ Berkeley, ceased to advertise its meets in 1820, ‘in order to avoid the pressure of a swarm of nondescripts starting from every suburb in London’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed.
Tyrone, a county of mountains and bogs intermixed with fertile agricultural areas, collieries and bleach fields, had a population of about 300,000 in 1831. The predominance of its Protestant inhabitants, who formed the bulk of the large electorate, was especially marked in Omagh, the county town, as well as in the disfranchised boroughs of Augher, Clogher and Strabane.Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), vi. 254; PP (1824), xxi. 696; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii.
