County Tipperary () is a county in Ireland. It is in the province of Munster and the Southern Region. The county is named after the town of Tipperary, and was established in the early 13th century, shortly after the Norman invasion of Ireland. It is Ireland's largest inland county and shares a border with eight counties, more than any other. The population of the county was 159,553 at the 2016 census. The largest towns are Clonmel, Nenagh and Thurles.
Tipperary County Council is the local authority for the county. In 1838, County Tipperary was divided into two ridings, North and South. From 1899 until 2014, they had their own county councils. They were unified under the Local Government Reform Act 2014, which came into effect following the 2014 local elections on 3 June 2014.
Geography
Tipperary is the sixth-largest of the 32 counties by area and the 12th largest by population. It is the third-largest of Munster's six counties by both size and population. It is also the largest landlocked county in Ireland.
Tipperary is bounded (clockwise) by counties Offaly, Laois, Kilkenny, Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Clare and Galway. Its eight neighbours are the most of any county on the island.
The region is part of the central plain of Ireland, but the diverse terrain contains several mountain ranges: the Knockmealdown, the Galtee, the Arra Hills and the Silvermine Mountains. Most of the county is drained by the River Suir; the north-western part by tributaries of the River Shannon; the eastern part by the River Nore; the south-western corner by the Munster Blackwater. No part of the county touches the coast. The centre is known as 'the Golden Vale', a rich pastoral stretch of land in the Suir basin which extends into counties Limerick and Cork. At 917 m, Galtymore is the highest point.
The Devil's Bit is a part of the Slieve Bloom range. The River Shannon flows along the northwest border with counties Limerick, Galway and Clare. The River Suir rises at the Devil's Bit and flows into the sea at Waterford.
Baronies
There are 12 historic baronies in County Tipperary: Clanwilliam, Eliogarty, Iffa and Offa East, Iffa and Offa West, Ikerrin, Kilnamanagh Lower, Kilnamanagh Upper, Middle Third, Ormond Lower, Ormond Upper, Owney and Arra and Slievardagh.
Civil parishes and townlands
Parishes were delineated after the Down Survey as an intermediate subdivision, with multiple townlands per parish and multiple parishes per barony. The civil parishes had some use in local taxation and were included on the nineteenth century maps of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland. For poor law purposes, district electoral divisions replaced the civil parishes in the mid-nineteenth century. There are 199 civil parishes in the county. Townlands are the smallest officially defined geographical divisions in Ireland; there are 3,159 townlands in the county.
Largest towns
History
Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the Kingdom of Munster was claimed as a lordship. By 1210, the sheriffdom of Munster shired into the shires of Tipperary and Limerick. In 1328, Tipperary was granted to the Earls of Ormond as a county palatine or liberty. The grant excluded church lands such as the archiepiscopal see of Cashel, which formed the separate county of Cross Tipperary. Though the Earls gained jurisdiction over the church lands in 1662, "Tipperary and Cross Tipperary" were not definitively united until the County Palatine of Tipperary Act 1715, when the 2nd Duke of Ormond was attainted for supporting the Jacobite rising of 1715.
The county was divided once again in 1838. The county town of Clonmel, where the grand jury held its twice-yearly assizes, is at the southern limit of the county, and roads leading north were poor, making the journey inconvenient for jurors resident there. A petition to move the county town to a more central location was opposed by the MP for Clonmel, so instead the county was split into two "ridings"; the grand jury of the South Riding continued to meet in Clonmel, while that of the North Riding met in Nenagh. When the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 established county councils to replace the grand jury for civil functions, the ridings became separate "administrative counties" with separate county councils. Their names were changed from "Tipperary North/South Riding" to "North/South Tipperary" by the Local Government Act 2001, which redesignated all "administrative counties" as simply "counties". The Local Government Reform Act 2014 has amalgamated the two counties and restored a single county of Tipperary.