County Waterford
Port Láirge
- IrishPort Láirge
- ProvinceMunster
- County townWaterford; Dungarvan was the county council seat until 2014
- Local governmentWaterford City and County Council, one council since 2014
- Area1,858 km²
- Population127,363 (2022)
- Highest pointKnockmealdown, 792.4 m
The flag from Paris
In March 1848 the Irish Confederation sent an address of congratulation to the new revolutionary government in France. Thomas Francis Meagher, son of a Waterford shipowner and mayor, was one of the three delegates who carried it.
He presented it in Paris on the third of April and came home with a tricolour of green, white and orange.
In July he was arrested in his father's house in Waterford. After the rising failed he was transported to Van Diemen's Land, escaped to New York, and commanded the Irish Brigade in the American Civil War.
On the first of July 1867, as acting governor of Montana, he fell overboard from a steamer at Fort Benton on the Missouri. His friends believed he was murdered. The record does not say.
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Reginald's Tower
The site of a wooden Viking fort. The stone tower is Anglo Norman, built as the strongest point of the city walls.
It has never fallen into ruin. It has been in use for over 800 years: a mint under King John, then a store for weapons, gunpowder and cannon, then a prison. The last residents were the family of a chief constable.
Today it holds part of the Waterford Museum of Treasures, given over to the city's Viking past.
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Ernest Walton
Born on the sixth of October 1903 at Abbeyside, Dungarvan, the son of a Methodist minister. He boarded at Methodist College, Belfast, and went on to Trinity College Dublin and then to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
There, with John Cockcroft, he built an accelerator. On the fourteenth of April 1932 Walton was the first to see lithium nuclei split by protons driven across 700,000 volts. The energy released matched Einstein's equation.
The two shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951. For sixty four years it was the only Irish Nobel prize in science. William Campbell, born in Ramelton, shared the prize for medicine in 2015.
He died in Belfast in 1995.
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