Aberdeenshire’s staples were an improving agriculture and fishing, and there was a thriving linen industry in Aberdeen. Besides the royal burghs of Aberdeen, Inverurie and Kintore, its principal centres of population were the ports of Fraserborough and Peterhead and the inland settlements of Aboyne, Alford, Ballater, Ellon, Huntly, Meldrum, Pitsligo and Turriff.Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1895), i.
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.
Londonderry, a ‘very grand’ and ‘extremely imposing’ city on the west bank of the Foyle, was a thriving port and expanding commercial centre, which had a lively populace and in this period boasted three newspapers, the Chronicle, Journal and Sentinel. J.C. Curwen, Observations on State of Ireland (1818), i. 222-6; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii. 195-205; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), ii. 297, 300-2; PP (1831-2), xliii. 99; (1836), xxiv.
Belfast, ‘a sort of metropolis of the north’, as Anne Plumptre observed, was already in the early nineteenth century a byword for economic prosperity and genteel, overwhelmingly Protestant, society.Strangers to that Land ed. A. Hadfield and J. McVeagh, 225-7; Hist. Irish Parl. ii. 168, 169. Its opulence derived from its rapidly expanding linen manufactures, but it also benefited from the production of cotton, yarn, butter, glass and shipbuilding, and it was a busy and profitable seaport. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.
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.
Huntingdon, the birth place of Oliver Cromwell, was separated from the borough of Godmanchester by the River Ouse.Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 369-70. It lacked the ‘stir and bustle’ usually associated with a county town, but continued to flourish in this period. William Cobbett† described it as ‘one of those pretty, clean, unstenched, unconfined places that tend to lengthen life and make it happy’. Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole, i.
As befitted the long-standing ambiguity of the cultural status of the Irish capital, which was at once both constitutionally and economically dependent and socially and intellectually irrepressible, Dublin after the Union witnessed both the depths of electoral chicanery which marked out its politics as those of a colonial sewer and the heights of inspirational fervour which brought Ireland’s great causes into the heart of the imperial Parliament. T.C.
Armagh, the seat of the primate of Ireland, was dismissed as a ‘mere village’ in one radical source, but was, in fact, in ‘a very improving state’, partly owing to its linen market, which was rebuilt in 1829.Peep at the Commons (1820), 20; PP (1831-2), xliii. 1; (1835), xxviii. 242; S. Lewis, Top. Dict. of Ireland (1837), i. 66-69. In addition to the cathedral and archiepiscopal palace, it boasted a public library and observatory, and, according to Henry David Inglis, was
Tavistock, situated in the Tavey valley 15 miles north of Plymouth, was one of the principal market towns of Devon. It was not entirely agricultural: it had an old tradition of coarse woollen manufacture and was located at the centre of the west Devon copper, tin and manganese mining district, though all these industries were in decline in this period. It was connected by a canal, opened in 1817, to the River Tamar and Plymouth. C.E. Hicks, ‘Tavistock’, Trans. Devon Assoc. lxxix (1947), 155, 159, 165-6; Pigot’s Commercial Dir. (1823-4), 251-3 and (1830), 259-60; P.V.
Portarlington, lying on the River Barrow with its left bank in King’s County and its right in Queen’s, had ‘little commerce’ and ‘no extensive manufactures’, the prosperity of its mainly Protestant population being ‘ascribed to its possessing a greater proportion of resident gentry than is generally to be found in towns of its size in Ireland’.
