Museums and places to go in Ireland

Ireland's antiquities, impressive by any standards, are mostly concentrated in the National Museum in Dublin, which should not be missed under any circumstances. But numerous small museums in the provinces offer local collections and eccentric private collections of varying quality.

Ireland also boasts a number of fine openair facilities that show off the lifestyles of earlier people in vivid detail with restored or reconstructed dwellings and workplaces. Most of these are in settings of great beauty.All charge nominal admission, if any, and are open year-round unless otherwise indicated; be sure to call for current hours before making a special trip.

Pig House Collection in County Cavan

Housed in a former piggery and several other outbuildings on a picturesque farm, this collection of folk items is an odd and idiosyncratic hodgepodge of dishes, tools, implements, pictures, bicycles, carriages, parasols, lace, 19thcentury costumes, bricabrac, and even a few rare treasures. Though a little off the beaten path, it is worth a visit perhaps as a detour on the way to Killykeen Forest Park not only for the collection itself but also for the trip through the very pleasant and out-of-theway countryside. From the midland town of Cavan, take the road west toward Killeshandra, then watch for the signpost.The gallery is about 8 miles from Cavan.

Bun Ratty Castle and Folk Park County Clare

Associated with the O'Briens, the Lords of Thomond, and now authentically restored and furnished in the style of the period, Bunratty Castle is currently famous for its jovial medieval banquets. But it is also one of Ireland's finest existing 15th-century castles.

Together with the adjoining Folk Park, whose several acres abound with period replicas of Irish rural and town dwellings as they would have appeared at the turn of the century, it provides a glimpse of how the Irish have lived during the last few centuries.

Visitors can step into whitewashed or limestone farmhouses, cottages, hovels, and other domiciles from different regions (one of them was moved from a spot that subsequently became a Shannon Airport runway), as well as a typical landowner's bothiin (hut), a blacksmith's forge, a weaver's shed, and a village street complete with post office, pub, school, doctor's office, hotel, and other shops.

Turf fires smolder fragrantly in the hearths, socks hang nearby to dry, an old farm implement leans casually against a wall so that it all looks as if someone has just left the room. The effect is totally charming. Bunratty House, a substantial late Georgian dwelling of the type once occupied by minor gentry, rounds out Bunratty's fine document of Irish social history. A small, well-illustrated guidebook to the castle, available on the spot, is worth getting.

Clare Heritage Centre County Clare

In an attractive small town at the edge of the Burren, a desolately beautiful semi-desert of limestone rock that is transformed in May and June by the brilliant blossoms of its rare and unusually varied flowering plants, travelers will find this enterprising project, in the specially converted early 19th-century Church of Saint Catherine.

The center's collection, which has won several awards for its creator, includes artifacts and documents from all over the county, attractively displayed alongside texts that are lively and readable as well as informative. It is also now the source of an extraordinarily complete documentation of Clare families over the period from 1800-1860 an enormous contribution to Irish genealogical and social research.

The Craggaunowen Project County Clare

Craggaunowen Castle, built by the McNamaras around 1550 and furnished with many items of historical and artistic importance from the John Hunt collection, is only the center-piece of this unique outdoor museum, which comprises a number of other structures that reach deep into the past to convey a sense of life in prehistoric times. On an island in the lake, a dwelling known as a crannog has been reconstructed on the foundations of an original; it is approached by a causeway that may have been used as early as the Bronze Age.

There is also a reconstructed ring fort, the farmstead of Ireland's early history, which has an underground passageway for storage and refuge. Patty O'Neill runs a program whose aim is to interest and train young people in the fine traditional art of thatching. Displays also include the Brendan, the leather boat in which the writer and amateur sailor Tim Severin crossed the Atlantic a decade or so ago in an attempt to prove that the 5th-century St. Brendan could have discovered America, as legend has it, when sailing the seas in search of paradise.

Glenveagh Castle and Glebe Gallery County Donegal

Glenveagh National Park, which sprawls over 25,000 acres of Donegal's wild and remote Derryveagh Mountains, includes in its boundaries the awesome Poisoned Glen; the long tongue of Lough Veagh; and, at the edge of its waters, where salmon leap and red deer come to drink, the grounds of Glenveagh Castle, its towers and battlements constituting one of the more romantic creations of 19th-century Ireland.

Successive owners have created gardens of extraordinary beauty formal, terraced, and graced with statuary, criss-crossed by secret pathways, and dissolving gradually into the native heather scrub and dwarf oak of the surrounding rugged mountains. The government purchased the outlying lands in 1975, Philadelphia's Henry Mcilhenny gave the grounds and the castle to the Irish people in 1981, and they are now all open to the public, together with the former home of painter Derek Hill at Gartan Lough, on the edge of the estate.

The castle is filled with rare furniture mostly Georgian, some Irish, all of it very fine and a special gallery on the grounds of Hill's studio displays an extensive art collection that includes ceramics by Picasso, lithographs by Kokoschka, paintings and sketches by Annigoni, and wallpapers by William Morris, as well as works by distingUIshed Irish artists.

A number of informed people regard the whole complex as the most wonderful spot in all Ireland. A visitors' center, restaurant, and cafe are on the premises, and a free minibus takes travelers around the grounds.

Chester Beatty Library Dublin

The collection that copper mIllIonaire Chester Beatty bequeathed to the Irish nation in 1968, housed near the Royal Dublin Society building in plush, embassy belt Ballsbridge, evokes one superlative after another. The collection of Islamic art and manuscripts, among the finest in the world, includes more than 250 Korans; Persian, Turkish, and Indian painting are also extensively covered. The collection of Chinese jade books is unique.

The Chinese snuffbox collection numbers 900 pieces, and that of rhinoceros horn cups includes some 220 items. The collection of Japanese illuminated manuscripts (narae) ranks with the foremost in Europe, as does the collection of Japanese woodblock prints (surimono). The superb group of Western manuscripts includes illuminated books of hours and a volume of gospels from Stavelot Abbey, executed in Flanders in about AD 1000.

The important biblical papyri, 11 manuscript volumes of the Bible dating from the early 2nd to the 4th century, are also in the library's possession. Naturally, it is possible to display only a tiny fraction of the library's holdings at a time, but the permanent exhibitions offer a representative sampling, and there are major shows a few times a year.

Museum of Natural History in Dublin

Dublin, Irish Republic: Much loved for its refusal to change an iota over the course of the past century, this museum, originally among the three major Royal Dublin Society collections, was moved over a century ago to a building designed by Thomas Clarendon and constructed on the south side of Leinster Lawn, with an entrance on Merrion Square. The first sight to greet a visitor's eye is that old favorite, the Basking Shark, a huge preserved shark which hangs from the ceiling.

Also popular is the display of birds, as well as the three magnificent skeletons of Giant Irish Deer, believed to be about 10,000 years old. On the ground floor, the Irish Room displays Irish fauna and a new exhibition of Irish insects.

An impressive collection of big game heads and antlers from India and Africa bison, panda, giraffe, okapi, rhinos, hippos, elephants, and gorillas hanging on pillars and walls in the galleries on the upper floor transports museumgoers to late Victorian times. On the next floor are exotic shells, butterflies, and birds plus skeletons of the extinct dodo, solitaire, and giant bird of Madagascar, with its 7inch egg. A priceless assemblage of glass models of the invertebrates, which dates from the museum's earliest days, is also well worth seeing.

Suspended from the roof are the huge skeletons of humpback whales. From the museum's last period of vigorous acquisition the 1880s to 1914, when deepsea explorations generated additions to the marine biology and zoology sections to very recently, there was little activity in the museum; the impressive geological collection has long languished unseen for want of a proper home.

In the geological section there is a small exhibition of Irish rocks and minerals, and the museum has expanded its activities in the field of entomology and marine invertebrates.There is so much to see and do in Ireland that the best way to get around the attractions is to hire a car from the airport at Galway, Knock, Dublin, Shannon, Knock or Cork Airports.

The National Gallery of Ireland

Located on the western side of one of Ireland's finest Georgian districts, Merrion Square, within walking distance of the center of town, the National Gallery has been called the best small gallery in Europe. Certainly, considering its chronic shortage of funds, it has a remarkable collection, with some outstanding examples of the works of all major schools, particularly the Italian and Dutch.

Under the previous director, James White, and the present director, Homan Potterton, the gallery has shaken off an apparent case of the doldrums, regained much of its style of several decades past, and begun to achieve its potential. Andrea di Bartolo, Fra Angelico, Uccello, Signorelli, Perugino, Titian, Rembrandt, EI Greco, and David are all represented; a collection of more than 30 Turner watercolors is shown every January.

The Irish School is brilliantly represented by the works of Jack Yeats and earlier painters such as Nathaniel Hone, Walter Osborne, William Orpen, and James Arthur O'Connor. Though staff shortages often cause a number of its rooms to be closed, the gallery is lively and interesting, with an educational policy, a good research library, a modest bookshop, and an inexpensive restaurant that has become a popular Dublin meeting place.