The original Suir Blueway!
On this day in 1756, a £1,500 contract was signed between Clonmel Corporation and Joseph Grubb, Richard Shaw and William Markham to construct a towpath supported by a dry-stone wall along the northern bank of the River Suir between Clonmel and Carrick.
Starting at the Clonmel end, the plan was to develop the towpath down to Carrick. By 1789, the towpath was complete. Up until this, boats called ‘noddies’ carrying loads of 7+ tons had been pulled up the river by gangs of men and women with ropes on their shoulders up the south bank of the river (the Waterford side). But now with the completion of a new towpath, horse-drawn barges were able to pull cargoes of 40 tons up the new towpath on the Tipperary side of the river. These new developments permitted merchandise to be moved in less time and more economically between the two towns.
Because of the existence of the navigation from Clonmel to Carrick, it made these towns significant collecting and distributing centres. The traders supplied and purchased goods over an area embracing the towns of Tipperary, Thurles, Templemore, Cashel, Roscrea, Fethard and many smaller places. The principal articles carried inland were coal, grain, flour, manures, seeds, foreign timber and a variety of shop goods. The goods brought down river included corn, oats, flour, condensed milk, wool, eggs, native timbers and more.
The opening of the Waterford to Limerick railway in 1854 was to herald the eventual demise of the river trade between Clonmel and Carrick/Waterford although trade was to remain strong for a number of years afterwards. Michael Ahern claims that it was the 1920s before trade declined to the point that the Suir Navigation Company, which charged tolls on the river traffic, was ‘moribund’.
Source:
Michael Ahern, Rare Clonmel, pp252-261.
William Despard Hemphill, pioneering photographer, died in Clonmel on this day in 1902.
Hemphill, a medical doctor by profession, became interested in photography in the 1850s when it was still in its infancy. In 1860 he published a book, ‘Stereoscopic illustrations of Clonmel and the surrounding country including abbeys, castles and scenery’. It contains eighty-one pairs of stereoscopic photographs and a frontispiece of Hemphill beside his camera at the Rock of Cashel. Stereoscopic imaging was a technique consisting of photographs taken in pairs from slightly different angles which, when viewed through a stereoscope device, had a three-dimensional effect.
Generally, the subject matter of the stereo pairs is antiquarian, taken, for example, at Cashel, Holycross, Lismore, Ardfinnan,Cahir, and Clonmel. A small number of stereos was taken of scenery. The book was dedicated to Hemphill’s friend Lady Catherine Osborne of Newtown Anner, ‘for her love of everything beautiful in nature and art, her warm admiration of photography, or her many private virtues and endearing qualities.’
In the early 1860s Hemphill joined the Amateur Photographic Association (APA), founded in Britain in 1861. He exhibited in the APA throughout the 1860s and was a prize-winner from 1863 to 1867. In 1864 he had six photographs accepted in the highest class and was awarded a prize for his ‘Drawing room at Newtown Anner’. The following year he was awarded a silver goblet for his photograph ‘Kilmanahan Castle’. In the Dublin International Exhibition (1865) he had twenty photographs accepted and was awarded a medal for his skill in photographic printing and for his artistic choice of subjects. In 1867 he was awarded a prize in the APA for a photograph entitled ‘White currants, the prize of prizes’, and in the same year he had acceptances in the Paris Universal Exhibition.
Hemphill married Sarah Henrietta Peddar in 1849 and the couple had four children. They lived in an attractive two-storey Georgian Villa called Oakville which was demolished in 1974 to make way for a shopping centre.Hemphill died in 1902 aged 85 and is buried on the grounds of the Old St. Mary’s Churchyard in Clonmel.
Sources:
https://www.dib.ie/biography/hemphill-william-despard-a3920
Michael Ahern, Figures in a Clonmel Landscape, (2006) pp205-211
Pat Holland, Tipperary Images: The Photography of Dr.William Despard Hemphill, (2003)
