Ireland attractions
The National Museum Dublin
The massive Thomas Deane building on Kildare Street into which the old Royal Dublin Society moved its collection in 1890 and, shortly thereafter, the antiquities from the Royal Irish Academy has lost some of its territory over the years.
Its display space is inadequate, and many items are not exhibited to their best advantage. These shortcomings notwithstanding, the museum should not be missed. It has priceless collections of prehistoric gold artifacts, such as solid gold dress fasteners, torques, and lunulae made by the skilled craftsmen of the Bronze and Iron ages.
An exhibition area called The Treasury features the museum's important collection of early Christian metalwork, including the Ardagh Chalice and the Cross of Congo The Georgian silver, Waterford crystal, and Belleek pottery on display are equally captivating.
Visitors should not miss the collection of Irish harps, uilleann pipes, and other musical instruments, nor the Derrynaflan chalice, paten, and strainer, found in March 1980 at Killenaule in Tipperary. Finds from the site of Viking Dublin are on display in the museum's exhibition center at nearby Merrion Row.
The James Joyce Museum County Dublin
Like other Martello towers around the Irish coast, the one that houses this museum was built in 1804 to withstand a threatened Napoleonic invasion, and it would have remained an attractive but fairly anonymous pile of granite had it not been for James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the greatest novels in the English language.
The novel begins: Do you pay rent for this tower? Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said. To the Secretary of State for War, Stephen added over his shoulder ... Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello, you call it? Joyce lived here briefly in 1904 with a medical student friend named Oliver St.
John Gogarty, who paid an annual rent to the War Office for his tenancy, and emerged in print as the stately plump Buck Mulligan to Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego. Sylvia Beach, Ulysses' first publisher, opened the tower as a museum in 1962, and it now holds an odd and varied collection of memorabilia: the writer's piano and guitar; his waistcoat, tie, and cane; and letters, manuscripts, photographs, and rare editions.
But the chief exhibit is the tower itself, a squat structure looking across Dublin Bay to Howth that is one of the few of its type currently open to the public.On June 16, the day when the events described in Ulysses took place, the tower is the beginning for many a Joyce fan's Doomsday tour.
Muckross House and Gardens County Kerry
The emphasis at this museum, another among the Republic's most forward looking, is as much on displaying the objects in an interesting way as on preserving them, and a great deal of thought and effort has been put into every exhibit. In addition, potters and weavers can be seen at work, producing the kinds of items displayed in the museum proper.
When sated, visitors can go out for a stroll on one of the nature trails that meander across the vast grounds (which, together with the early 19th century house containing the exhibits, were presented to the nation in 1932 and now comprise the 25,000 acre Killarney National Park). The footpaths alone might warrant a visit here, encircling two of the lakes of Killarney. There is also a superb natural rock garden d an abundance of freeroaming red deer and rare flora.
The Horse Museum County Kildare
Having produced some of the world's greatest thoroughbreds, County Kildare is still turning them out at the Irish National Stud on whose grounds this museum is located; a few of these animals and their prgeny may be seen before and after viewing its collections.Small but interesting, the exhibits trace the history of the horse from the Bronze Age to modern times and cover not only horses involved in racing, hunting, show Jumping, and steeplechasing, but also draft horses and others not at the fore of the IrIsh horse scene.
Occupying center stage is the skeleton of the late Arkle (1957-66), one of the nation's greatest and bestloved steeplechasers, who made a place for himself In equine history when he won the Cheltenham Gold Cup 3 years in a row much to the consternation of British trainers and the glee of every IrIshman plus some 27 other victories in only 35 starts. For achievement-oriented visitors, there's an automated quiz and nearby are beautiful Japanese gardens laid out by a turnofthecentury Japanese landscape architect named Eida.
Monaghan County Museum
One of the Republic's first county museums, this institution formerly situated in a bleak old courthouse with huge Doric columns that must have put the fear of God into prisoners during the last century has a stunning and eclectic collectIon ranging from Neolithic relics to folk items.
And it now has a home of Its own that provides the showcase they deserve. Stuffed with china dinner sets, lace made in nearby Carrikmacross, and the cotton crochet known as Clones lace, the museum also contains artifacts such as the Cross of Clog her, which dates from the early 15th centry, as well as a cauldron (ca. 800 BC) found in a bog in 1854, old photographs, and In an openaccess exhibition area, a collection of querns (hand mills), milk churns, and milestones from the now unused Ulster Canal.
County Castle Museum County Wexford
A medieval air hangs over this town, with its narrow streets winding down to the rIver Slaney on one side and with Vinegar Hill, where the Irish rebels were defeated In 1758, rising on the other. The museum, housed in a 13th-century Norman castle on which the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser once held a lease (one of the few Irish castles not in ruins), contains muskets, pikes, and other relics of the battle, as well as objects from the 1916 Rising (during which this town was the last in the country to surrender).
But the museum's contents are not restricted to military impedimenta: A kltcheq at the back of the castle and a dairy showcase traditional cooking utensils and tools, including churns used in the old days for making butter and cheese. There are also striking displays of figureheads salvaged from ships wrecked off the coast, a stone covered with ogham script, ships' anchors, stone crosses, an chahces dating from the 17th century.
A recently added feature is a sports collection,housed In a hitherto unused tower of the castle. And if all this is not enough temptation, the view from the castle roof alone is worth the visit.
National Heritage Park County Wexford
The museum on the sloping banks of the river Slaney estuary is devoted to showing a full range of Irish historic buildings, with structures dating. from the time of the earliest settlements to the present from stone Circles and burial sites to early Christian churches round towers, and the first Viking and Norman communities. It IS an elaborate undrtaking and thoroughly splendid.
Irish Agricultural Museum Wexford
In the restored 19th-century farm buildings of Victorian Gothic Johnstown Castle, about 3 miles southwest of Wexford Town, this museum provides an excellent picture of just how much Irish farming has changed in the last 50 years. Its display of old farming and rural craft items, the country's largest, includes the hand flails, pitchers, turnip pulpers, buttermaking instruments, ploughs, harrows, sowers, mowing machines, harnesses, and carts and traps that were once among every Irish farmer's most important tools.
A complete model of an old kitchen is on exhibit, along with a laundry, creamery, laborer's bedroom, and stable. There are also displays 'on coopering, blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, harness making, and traditional Irish country furniture. The castle's 50-acre gardens full of meandering pathways, artificial lakes, and interesting shrubs and flowers are also a delight, and a tearoom is open at the museum from June through August.
The castle and surrounding farm are used for soil research by the Agricultural Institute.
The Ulster Museum Belfast
Housed in a 1920s neo-classical building with a well-designed modern addition that stands right in the city's delightful Botanic Gardens, the collections are broad-ranging: There's an old, functioning water wheel (in the Industrial Archaeology section); a group of contemporary paintings and sculpture unrivaled in Ireland (in the Art Galleries); prehistoric artifacts including the only surviving pair of late Bronze Age trumpets that can still be played; a display of minerals and gemstones unique in the country (including the largest group of quartz crystals in Britain and Ireland, an attractive display of fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals in a darkened central vault, and a full size cave); and, for a touch of glitter, the fabulous collection of jewelry, coins, and other items recovered from the Girona, a galley of the Spanish Armada that went down off the Antrim Coast in 1588.
The Living Sea exhibit abounds with realistic models of marine creatures, and the Dinosaur Show, a gallery designed with children in mind, features a nearcomplete skeleton of Anatosaurus annecteus as well as an enormous, now extinct, coelacanth in the old entrance hall. The museum store sells copies of the gold No tengo mas que darte ring, the original of which was worn by a Spanish sailor as he went to his watery grave, mindful, no doubt, of the sweetheart who gave it to him.
The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum County Down
For a glimpse of how Ulster folk lived back at the turn of the century. Brick by brick, stone by stone, terraces of townhouses, as well as farmhouses, mills, a church, and schools, were moved here, then furnishd with the everyday objects of the appropriate period, and landscaped as they might have been originally.
A farm from mid-Antrim has been reconstructed right down to the stone walls, hedges, and ditches around the fields. There's also an assortment of galleries filled with domestic and agricultural artifacts and vehicles used in Irish transport over the ages rail, road, air, and sea. In fact, the museum is the home of the finest and most comprehensive such display in Ireland, with wheelless sledges, elegant horsedrawn carriages, automobiles (including a De Lorean sports car prototype), and even a vertical take-off plane.
The Ulster-American Folk Park
Born in 1813 in a thatch-roofed cottage near here, Thomas Mellon emigrated to the New World at the age of 5 and then traveled overland by wagon to western Pennsylvania, where he grew up as the son of struggling small farmers to found the banking empire that bears his name.
Now, the original Mellon cottage is restored, and it serves as the center of a 26-acre folk park where the Old World and New World stand physically side by side. From 19th-century Ulster, where turf fires burn, blacksmiths work at their forges, craftsmen toil in their thatchroofed cottages, and hardware stores sell lamp wicks and foot warmers, visitors are transported to a very different American landscape, complete with log cabins, a covered wagon, and a reconstructed Pennsylvania farm complex that has been furnished and equipped exactly like the one in which Mellon spent his boyhood, where demonstrators bake, weave, and churn, and log fires crackle on the hearth.
The massive Thomas Deane building on Kildare Street into which the old Royal Dublin Society moved its collection in 1890 and, shortly thereafter, the antiquities from the Royal Irish Academy has lost some of its territory over the years.
Its display space is inadequate, and many items are not exhibited to their best advantage. These shortcomings notwithstanding, the museum should not be missed. It has priceless collections of prehistoric gold artifacts, such as solid gold dress fasteners, torques, and lunulae made by the skilled craftsmen of the Bronze and Iron ages.
An exhibition area called The Treasury features the museum's important collection of early Christian metalwork, including the Ardagh Chalice and the Cross of Congo The Georgian silver, Waterford crystal, and Belleek pottery on display are equally captivating.
Visitors should not miss the collection of Irish harps, uilleann pipes, and other musical instruments, nor the Derrynaflan chalice, paten, and strainer, found in March 1980 at Killenaule in Tipperary. Finds from the site of Viking Dublin are on display in the museum's exhibition center at nearby Merrion Row.
The James Joyce Museum County Dublin
Like other Martello towers around the Irish coast, the one that houses this museum was built in 1804 to withstand a threatened Napoleonic invasion, and it would have remained an attractive but fairly anonymous pile of granite had it not been for James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the greatest novels in the English language.
The novel begins: Do you pay rent for this tower? Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said. To the Secretary of State for War, Stephen added over his shoulder ... Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello, you call it? Joyce lived here briefly in 1904 with a medical student friend named Oliver St.
John Gogarty, who paid an annual rent to the War Office for his tenancy, and emerged in print as the stately plump Buck Mulligan to Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego. Sylvia Beach, Ulysses' first publisher, opened the tower as a museum in 1962, and it now holds an odd and varied collection of memorabilia: the writer's piano and guitar; his waistcoat, tie, and cane; and letters, manuscripts, photographs, and rare editions.
But the chief exhibit is the tower itself, a squat structure looking across Dublin Bay to Howth that is one of the few of its type currently open to the public.On June 16, the day when the events described in Ulysses took place, the tower is the beginning for many a Joyce fan's Doomsday tour.
Muckross House and Gardens County Kerry
The emphasis at this museum, another among the Republic's most forward looking, is as much on displaying the objects in an interesting way as on preserving them, and a great deal of thought and effort has been put into every exhibit. In addition, potters and weavers can be seen at work, producing the kinds of items displayed in the museum proper.
When sated, visitors can go out for a stroll on one of the nature trails that meander across the vast grounds (which, together with the early 19th century house containing the exhibits, were presented to the nation in 1932 and now comprise the 25,000 acre Killarney National Park). The footpaths alone might warrant a visit here, encircling two of the lakes of Killarney. There is also a superb natural rock garden d an abundance of freeroaming red deer and rare flora.
The Horse Museum County Kildare
Having produced some of the world's greatest thoroughbreds, County Kildare is still turning them out at the Irish National Stud on whose grounds this museum is located; a few of these animals and their prgeny may be seen before and after viewing its collections.Small but interesting, the exhibits trace the history of the horse from the Bronze Age to modern times and cover not only horses involved in racing, hunting, show Jumping, and steeplechasing, but also draft horses and others not at the fore of the IrIsh horse scene.
Occupying center stage is the skeleton of the late Arkle (1957-66), one of the nation's greatest and bestloved steeplechasers, who made a place for himself In equine history when he won the Cheltenham Gold Cup 3 years in a row much to the consternation of British trainers and the glee of every IrIshman plus some 27 other victories in only 35 starts. For achievement-oriented visitors, there's an automated quiz and nearby are beautiful Japanese gardens laid out by a turnofthecentury Japanese landscape architect named Eida.
Monaghan County Museum
One of the Republic's first county museums, this institution formerly situated in a bleak old courthouse with huge Doric columns that must have put the fear of God into prisoners during the last century has a stunning and eclectic collectIon ranging from Neolithic relics to folk items.
And it now has a home of Its own that provides the showcase they deserve. Stuffed with china dinner sets, lace made in nearby Carrikmacross, and the cotton crochet known as Clones lace, the museum also contains artifacts such as the Cross of Clog her, which dates from the early 15th centry, as well as a cauldron (ca. 800 BC) found in a bog in 1854, old photographs, and In an openaccess exhibition area, a collection of querns (hand mills), milk churns, and milestones from the now unused Ulster Canal.
County Castle Museum County Wexford
A medieval air hangs over this town, with its narrow streets winding down to the rIver Slaney on one side and with Vinegar Hill, where the Irish rebels were defeated In 1758, rising on the other. The museum, housed in a 13th-century Norman castle on which the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser once held a lease (one of the few Irish castles not in ruins), contains muskets, pikes, and other relics of the battle, as well as objects from the 1916 Rising (during which this town was the last in the country to surrender).
But the museum's contents are not restricted to military impedimenta: A kltcheq at the back of the castle and a dairy showcase traditional cooking utensils and tools, including churns used in the old days for making butter and cheese. There are also striking displays of figureheads salvaged from ships wrecked off the coast, a stone covered with ogham script, ships' anchors, stone crosses, an chahces dating from the 17th century.
A recently added feature is a sports collection,housed In a hitherto unused tower of the castle. And if all this is not enough temptation, the view from the castle roof alone is worth the visit.
National Heritage Park County Wexford
The museum on the sloping banks of the river Slaney estuary is devoted to showing a full range of Irish historic buildings, with structures dating. from the time of the earliest settlements to the present from stone Circles and burial sites to early Christian churches round towers, and the first Viking and Norman communities. It IS an elaborate undrtaking and thoroughly splendid.
Irish Agricultural Museum Wexford
In the restored 19th-century farm buildings of Victorian Gothic Johnstown Castle, about 3 miles southwest of Wexford Town, this museum provides an excellent picture of just how much Irish farming has changed in the last 50 years. Its display of old farming and rural craft items, the country's largest, includes the hand flails, pitchers, turnip pulpers, buttermaking instruments, ploughs, harrows, sowers, mowing machines, harnesses, and carts and traps that were once among every Irish farmer's most important tools.
A complete model of an old kitchen is on exhibit, along with a laundry, creamery, laborer's bedroom, and stable. There are also displays 'on coopering, blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, harness making, and traditional Irish country furniture. The castle's 50-acre gardens full of meandering pathways, artificial lakes, and interesting shrubs and flowers are also a delight, and a tearoom is open at the museum from June through August.
The castle and surrounding farm are used for soil research by the Agricultural Institute.
The Ulster Museum Belfast
Housed in a 1920s neo-classical building with a well-designed modern addition that stands right in the city's delightful Botanic Gardens, the collections are broad-ranging: There's an old, functioning water wheel (in the Industrial Archaeology section); a group of contemporary paintings and sculpture unrivaled in Ireland (in the Art Galleries); prehistoric artifacts including the only surviving pair of late Bronze Age trumpets that can still be played; a display of minerals and gemstones unique in the country (including the largest group of quartz crystals in Britain and Ireland, an attractive display of fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals in a darkened central vault, and a full size cave); and, for a touch of glitter, the fabulous collection of jewelry, coins, and other items recovered from the Girona, a galley of the Spanish Armada that went down off the Antrim Coast in 1588.
The Living Sea exhibit abounds with realistic models of marine creatures, and the Dinosaur Show, a gallery designed with children in mind, features a nearcomplete skeleton of Anatosaurus annecteus as well as an enormous, now extinct, coelacanth in the old entrance hall. The museum store sells copies of the gold No tengo mas que darte ring, the original of which was worn by a Spanish sailor as he went to his watery grave, mindful, no doubt, of the sweetheart who gave it to him.
The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum County Down
For a glimpse of how Ulster folk lived back at the turn of the century. Brick by brick, stone by stone, terraces of townhouses, as well as farmhouses, mills, a church, and schools, were moved here, then furnishd with the everyday objects of the appropriate period, and landscaped as they might have been originally.
A farm from mid-Antrim has been reconstructed right down to the stone walls, hedges, and ditches around the fields. There's also an assortment of galleries filled with domestic and agricultural artifacts and vehicles used in Irish transport over the ages rail, road, air, and sea. In fact, the museum is the home of the finest and most comprehensive such display in Ireland, with wheelless sledges, elegant horsedrawn carriages, automobiles (including a De Lorean sports car prototype), and even a vertical take-off plane.
The Ulster-American Folk Park
Born in 1813 in a thatch-roofed cottage near here, Thomas Mellon emigrated to the New World at the age of 5 and then traveled overland by wagon to western Pennsylvania, where he grew up as the son of struggling small farmers to found the banking empire that bears his name.
Now, the original Mellon cottage is restored, and it serves as the center of a 26-acre folk park where the Old World and New World stand physically side by side. From 19th-century Ulster, where turf fires burn, blacksmiths work at their forges, craftsmen toil in their thatchroofed cottages, and hardware stores sell lamp wicks and foot warmers, visitors are transported to a very different American landscape, complete with log cabins, a covered wagon, and a reconstructed Pennsylvania farm complex that has been furnished and equipped exactly like the one in which Mellon spent his boyhood, where demonstrators bake, weave, and churn, and log fires crackle on the hearth.
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