By Elizabeth B
If you’re looking for a fun, quirky museum that encapsulates every little thing that makes up Old Ireland, look no further than the Old Irish Ways museum in Bruff, County Limerick.
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Part museum, part personal collection and full-on exhibition, the Old Irish Ways museum is home to hundreds of thousands of items, curios, and artifacts, dating from pre-famine times, which together tell the stories of the ways of the old Irish village, and the development and modernization of our culture.
Staged in an unassuming shed in the proprietor’s back garden, nothing prepared us for what was lying in wait behind those doors of Old Irish Ways…especially upstairs!
Old, Bold and Full of Charm
Bright and bold were the colors of the day, and everything from farm machinery, ironwork, and utensils, as well as advertising, tin signs, and tools, is collected here, hanging from the shed walls like a great metal rainbow.
Denis O’Connor, the proprietor of Old Irish Ways, leans on an old kiosk, the gate of the Hogan Stand in pre-refurbished Croke Park, to tell us a little of the history of his collection.
Great care has been taken to maintain the integrity of these items, some purchased and some donated.
Denis has curated the collection built up over time into something quite wonderful.
An original famine soup pot, used to feed the starving masses during our country’s hardest period, sits empty in the corner, full of history. Stacks of GAA magazines and programs, tin kettles, and bicycle repair tins line the shelves, while bottle openers hang from nails above.
Cisterns, bellows, a collection of telephones from a switchboard to the very first models in Ireland, and the more recognizable pocket-sized versions are all here, in addition to tools, spools, equipment, and kits, lifted right out of an Ireland of times gone by.
You’ll also find the entire contents of an old-fashioned haberdashery store, as well as shop vending household essentials like washing powder and table salt, alongside sweets (candy), biscuits (in tins), hatpins, and mouse traps.
The original apothecary medicine cabinet from the hospital in Limerick is still stocked with medicines and products from the 1930s.
A whole wall of whiskey water jugs, rare cigarette manufacturers’ merchandise, antique pub ashtrays and enamel trays, and even the very furniture you would expect to house these rarefied objects, altogether frozen in time in this excellent little museum and heritage center.
A Remarkable Collection
The Old Irish Ways museum is laid out into the types of areas one would expect in an old Irish village: a farmhouse, a garage, a cobbler’s shop, a mechanic’s workshop, an ironworks, a school, a kitchen, and a home.
Guests are led past authentic petrol pumps, the type that once adorned the streets of every town in rural Ireland, past a nostalgic telephone box in traditional green and white, into the garage and back to a time long ago, where people lived with a lot less and mended much more.
Every shed in Ireland held similar tools, and every kitchen had similar patterned crockery, reserved strictly for the good meals — and for visitors. The items may be far from extraordinary, but it’s the sheer volume of artifacts presented to visitors and the memories collected that make it such a unique Irish attraction.
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Upstairs in the Old Irish Ways Museum
While the heavy machinery and industry belong on the ground floor, upstairs hides another wealth of memorabilia, primarily focused on schooling, the home, and matters of the hearth.
Antique roller dryers, sets of crockery, religious memorabilia, and ornaments vie for space around the kitchen table while stoking tools hang over the open fire.
In the schoolhouse, a duffel coat with large wooden buttons hangs from a hook on the half-door, children’s books line the shelves, and the blackboard is scuffed with chalk. Inkwells, long dry, await in the corner of vintage desks papered with catchecisms, nursery rhymes and the dreaded times tables.
And did we mention the bar?!
A fully fitted pub, decked out with neon, alcohol-branded signs, antique glasses and trays, a row of authentic optics, bicycles hanging from the roof, and colorful barstools fashioned from parts of old tractors, really completes the collection.
Pause behind the bar for a photo and imagine yourself serving rowdy patrons their precious potato poitín here back in the day!
The bar gives guests a place to sit and contemplate. The number of items is truly astounding.
How, I wondered, is the building still standing under the weight of so many memories?
It’s not just Irish history here either.
Old Irish Ways has some other artifacts of international concern.
A chunk of coil from the first Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, multi-layered and heavy. Cannonballs sourced from Cork that may have been flown in the Battle of Kinsale. A lump of pale, knobbly clay, labelled lava from Vesuvius, every one of them so interesting.
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Bruff – The Fitzgeralds’ (of John Fitzgerald Kennedy fame) Ancestral Home
Need another reason to visit Bruff, County Limerick?
It is also known as the ancestral home of the Fitzgeralds.
Thomas Fitzgerald, JFK’s great-grandfather, emigrated from Bruff in 1852.
At the nearby Thomas Fitzgerald Centre, you’ll find information on that family, a family tree mural, and a bronze statue of JFK, unveiled in 2019.
The Bruff connection was never forgotten. JFK himself used the bible Thomas brought from Bruff during his inauguration in 1961.
How to Get to Old Irish Ways Museum
Set your sights for Bruff, County Limerick, and your satellite navigation system for Cahirguillamore, V35 X236.
Situated just 20 kilometers/12 miles outside Limerick City, and only a 20-minute drive through charming winding laneways, the Old Irish Ways museum is a fascinating day trip and, for Irish visitors of a certain age, a real walk down memory lane!
This attraction ticks a lot of boxes for visitors to the area.
It is very interesting, unusual, off-the-beaten track, and not somewhere you’re likely to meet hoards of other tourists.
No big screens or tacky, touristy interpretation. Instead, a genuine collector, a warm welcome and a host of nostalgic artifacts to wonder and reminisce over.
Have you been to the Old Irish Ways museum? What did you think of the collection? Let us know in the comments below.
