9/20: A Step Back in Time at Belfast's Ulster Folk Museum

After spending so many hours in the absorbing Titanic Belfast attraction which covered the growth of Belfast during the Golden Age and the 'famously infamous' Titanic disaster, we longed to be outside and the Ulster Folk Park fit the bill. We were curious to step back in time into Northern Ireland's hard-working heritage. Many of the buildings were dismantled in their original locations and rebuilt in this open-air park that reminded me of Colonial Williamsburg and Upper Canada Village, the latter near my home when I grew up in Ottawa.

Cluan Place was built about 1884 as a red brick terraced street of two-story houses in East Belfast. The interior of five of the homes had been converted into modern accommodation to allow school, youth and community groups to stay overnight at the museum.

The end house was furnished as a dressmaker's house that had been occupied in 1911 by the Cranston family and consisted of an elderly couple and their two adult children. The 38 year-old daughter was a dressmaker who made up new garments or altered existing ones for local people. Many dressmakers also supplemented their income embroidering handkerchiefs and tablecloths for local linen manufacturers. Her brother worked as a laborer in the shipyard.

McCusker's Pub was modeled after a pub from Upper Irish St. in County Armagh, one of the nine counties that make up Ulster. The large front windows had an etched design incorporating a traditional pot-still advertisement for Old Bushmills Whiskey and was based on a similar ads known from a number of older pubs in Ulster. The front display window advertised the pub's wares and, more importantly, gave privacy in those days when drinking was considered disreputable. As a result, Bushmills Distillery offset the cost of the windows!

I was amused to see that after the public room or bar, there was a small private space called a 'snug' at the rear of the room! Many of the male clientele preferred to drink 'on the lick' so they could pay later, usually on pay day.

In the Ballycultra Dispensary next door we read that medicines imported from abroad became scarce and expensive during the First World War. Even something as basic as cod liver oil was six times as expensive as it had been in 1914. Local herb growers' associations were formed in response to wartime shortages.

Of particular importance was sphagnum moss which grew in damp Irish conditions as it possessed antiseptic qualities. Teams of moss-gatherers undertook the painstaking task of collecting the plant and others learned how to make bandages incorporating the moss! These bandages were sent to military hospitals as far away as Mesopotamia where the Allies were fighting the Turks.

The Catholic Church had been dismantled and moved to the folk museum from Portadown in County Armagh. Dedicated to St. John the Baptist, the church was built to serve the Roman Catholic Parish of Drumcree in 1793. The church was relatively rare in that it was built more than fifty years before the repeal of the Penal Laws which regulated the rights and status of Catholics in Ireland.

Early rural Catholic churches were strikingly similar to Presbyterian churches in Ulster with galleries on three sides and an altar on the long wall where the pulpit would frequently be found in Presbyterian churches of the 1700s. The magnificent early 1800s pipe organ came from another church. The museum was lucky enough to acquire a set of fourteen Stations of the Cross identical to those hung in the original church.

The church entrance, funnily enough, was down a narrow lane and opened to the side instead of the front of the church.

A big part of the museum was its Discovery Farm where we we could wander through some of the sixteen farms and associated businesses from 100 years ago. The first one we came to was Straid Corn Mill but it was closed.

Seeing the chickens pecking for food made me feel like we'd gone back into the 1800s.

The Coshkib Hill Farm from Cushendull had been dismantled and moved in 1965. The stone-built, two-story house likely started out as a modest two-room, thatched farmhouse. In the early 1900s, a second story with a slated roof was added to the house which allowed for two upstairs bedrooms and a downstairs parlor or 'good room' beside the main living room and kitchen. The last owner of the farm was a bachelor farmer who died in 1953 after running the farm for many years. His funeral wake was held in the house.

The house was heated by the open hearth in the kitchen. The farmhouse, a typical example of a Glens of Antrim house - the area comprised of nine glens or valleys north of Belfast - was re-erected at the museum on a steeply sloping site to reflect the farm's original location.

The home's ceilings were so low even for us!

Cattle and sheep were raised on the 35-acre farm and crops cultivated on it included oats, hay, potatoes and turnips. Both poultry and litters of pigs were raised.

I was really interested seeing the farm's peat shed as we'd seen lots of peat bogs in our almost 2,000 miles driving around Ireland at that point but had never actually touched, let alone seen, peat bricks. It was much softer than a real brick but didn't crumble when I handled it. I read that a sixth of Ireland's land surface was bog and that Finland was the only European country with more. Turf or peat from the bog has been the main source of fuel in Ireland for hundreds of years.

Next up was the Coalishand Spade Mill, something I hadn't known ever existed until we visited the Ulster Folk Museum. The spade, I learned, was undoubtedly the most distinctive of Irish agricultural implements. Excavations have shown that spades or plows, or perhaps both, were used long before the Bronze Age.

The importance of spades in the rural economy meant there were spade mills like this one all over Ulster. Here's a useless factoid for you - Ireland has more types of spades than any other European country, with more than 60 spade mills just in Ulster alone, each producing thousands of spades and shovels every year! This one spade mill produced a mind boggling 230 different types of spades. Did you know that spades could be either two-sided, with a footrest on either side of the shaft, or one-sided, with only one footrest?

From at least the 1600s, it was common for laborers from the poorest parts of the west of Ireland to travel to richer counties as 'scalpeens' selling their digging skills.

The people in the photo from 1915 were 'footing' turf to let it dry.

Some turf spades were used for digging down into the peat with others used for cutting in from the side to create block-shaped turf.

Since the 1980s there has been a revival of digging matches with the one-sided loy spade used. Both men and women compete in one of the most popular events in national plowing competitions. What a hoot it would be to watch people competing in a digging match as these people did in 2008!

Marion Boyce of Letterkenny - a town we visited several days previously - was the Women's Loy Champion in 2011.

This was a 'big loy,' the type of spade used in competition at modern competition matches.

The rural buildings on the Discovery Farm were quite dispersed as they might have been in 'real life' and made for a delightful walk and lots of exercise along country paths as we wondered what we might come across next! The traditional thatched and white washed Corradreenan Farmhouse was originally built in the 1750s in southwest County Fermagh before it was moved to the folk museum in 1967. The most distinguishing feature of the farmhouse was the sloping roof style which was thought to be of English origin.

We watched as the sow forcefully nudged her ten piglets out of the way so she could chomp on the grass!

Another peat shed:

The farmhouse had been home to the Elliots, a prosperous farming family who lived here for four generations. The family had about 18 acres band also owned other land in the area. By 1900, the farm had grown to 100 acres. In the 1850s, with eight people recorded as living in the house, living conditions in the farmhouse sure would have been cramped!

We chatted for a bit with the guide who told us the odorless peat burned longer than logs. A bucket of peat would last for close to two hours. She mentioned that the bogs do regenerate but take years to do so which is part of the environmental reason peat is rarely used nowadays. I asked her about why so many towns in Ulster had the 'Bally' prefix and she said it simply meant 'town of.'

The original layout only had a kitchen and bedroom but, by 1900, the house had been subdivided internally to provide five rooms. Arranging the living space this way was common from the 1850s and resulted from new ideas about the need for privacy within the home.

The Ballyveaghmore Farm, built in the 1840s, was originally situated in the foothills of the Mourne Mountains, a few miles from the coastal village of Annalong. The small farmhouse was built from local granite with a roped-down thatched roof. Its two-room layout was typical with the kitchen and hearth on one side of the chimney and a bedroom on the other. The floors were beaten earth except for granite flagstones at the entrance and around the hearth.

The guide told us that four generations of the Baird family had lived here. Though the house had no electricity or water, it was used as is until 1991! The last member of the family, Joe Baird, was born in 1912. A bachelor, Joe made few changes to the house during his lifetime. The hearth fire still heated the house, water was fetched from a nearby well and lighting was by candles or a paraffin oil lamp. What a hardy soul Baird must have been!

The Magheragallon Byre Dwelling was from the 1870s in County Donegal. This type of house was known as a byre dwelling because it housed both people and animals together in its single room. It had thick walls of mostly granite boulders and its thatched roof was held down securely by stone pegs in the wall heads.

Inside, at one end was the hearth and living area, while the byre was at he other end. No physical separation existed between man and beast when the house was occupied except for a stone flagged area and a stone drain by the byre.

The simple house furnishings represented the modest living conditions in many such houses in northwest Ireland in the early 1900s. The Ferry family used the house during the summer months when they brought their livestock down to graze the land. By the early 1970s the house was no longer being used by the family and it was sold to a local buyer.

Not far away was the Duncrun Cottiers House but I didn't see any information as to its history.

Drumnahunshin Farmhouse was built in the early 1800s in County Armagh. Originally a 30-acre farm, it was subdivided into a ten-acre farm by 1818 and a small flax mill was added which contributed to the owner's modest prosperity. Eventually, a cart house, stable, cow byre, milk house and a fuel store were added. The original farmhouse was a single story, two-room house with a central kitchen and a jamb or half wall to screen the kitchen fire from drafts.

In the early 1900s, the farmhouse was lengthened and improved by being both 'raised and slated' which added extra bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen, parlor and dining room downstairs with attractive mahogany furniture. The home was by far the most luxurious one we'd seen while wandering around the Discovery Farm.

The last person to live in the house was Miss Maggie Patterson who was born in 1888. As electricity was never installed, Maggie relied on oil lamps for lighting the home until she died in the mid 1960s.

The small country Corbeg Orange Hall was constructed in 1884 in County Monaghan for monthly meetings and social events such as dances for the Hand and Pen Loyal Order Lodge. The hall's layout was typical of small country Orange Halls of the period.

The lodge's heyday was before WW I when it had a steady membership of 60 to 80 members. After several of them died in the war, and the partition of Ireland in 1922, there were further decreases in the local Protestant population.

On July 12th, 1931, the county Orangemen - a Protestant political society in Northern Ireland - assembled in Monaghan for the annual parade. As a result of IRA or Catholic opposition to the Orange order, no marches were held in Counties Monaghan and neighboring Cavan after 1931. The lodge was donated to the museum in 1989 by the Lodge Master and County Grand Master.

Next to the lodge was the Ballydown National School that dated from 1865. The National School system was established in 1831 with the joint aims of making literate the mass of the population and of educating together the children of all denominations. Although built to accommodate '100 children on the rolls,' rarely were that number all present in class due to illness, absences and having to work.

The school consisted of one classroom, heated by a single fireplace. Education was regimented with some children standing at the front reciting their lessons while the rest of the class sat at their desks writing or doing math. Though frequent use of the cane ensured discipline, the children were apparently grateful because a basic education was provided free of charge!

The Ballydugan Weaver's House was modeled on a weaver's house and was typical of the homes of both linen weavers and small farmers in central Ulster. The house had two rooms, a kitchen and one bedroom. The boarded loft over the kitchen hearth allowed for extra storage space in the house.

The room behind the hearth wall was the weaver's workshop and housed a Jacquard loom used to work often complex patterns in damask linen weaving. As good light was essential to weaving, the workshop had decent windows. Many houses like Ballydugan were occupied by weavers and their families. Sometimes they employed and accommodated journeymen weavers - those who had completed an apprenticeship but worked for others. Weavers had to work long hours if they were to earn a decent living.

The weaver, who asked not to be photographed, stated she learned how to weave six years ago. We watched as she was making a piece of linen that will be 50 feet long. She told us it was 22 feet long and she had started it three weeks earlier. She said she was the only one who could do the weaving as everybody's tension is different so the measurements would differ.

We made our way back from the Discovery Farm to Ballycultra Town where we'd started our visit. One of the most interesting stops for me was to the basket shed where we had the opportunity to watch a man weave creations out of willows. The guide indicated the willows grew everywhere but it would take a month of backbreaking work to cut a half acre of the willows down to the ground.

He said to make a basket or lobster pot would only take a day but about a week to make one of the fascinating masks.

Lina: I think this mask might have scared your wee ones, don't you think!

He said he copies mostly old styles and every village would have had a basket shed or fishermen made their own baskets. We learned that a thatched roof was a dying craft and must be re-thatched every six years and cost a huge amount of money. Each roof had three acres of material on it!

I was very fortunate he kindly gave me a very large open heart made out of willows before we left his basket shed. Luckily it made it home in one piece and is now hanging just about a couple of feet away in our study. The guide, like some of the others, sold their crafts in the museum shop. I wanted to buy one of his lovely items there but the baskets, etc were just a tad unwieldy to think of transporting home!

The large, stone-built, two-story Old Rectory was originally built in 1717 in County Antrim. Scientists from Queen's University Belfast were able to determine the building's age from analyzing the growth rings in samples of oak timber from the roof. The house was remarkable for its age, with its steeply pitched thatched roof and the wall oven in the kitchen, a feature of early English Planter settlement. In the early 1830s, a building extension added two new rooms to the house, an upstairs bedroom and living room.

The McCullagh family lived in the house for most of its history. Reverend Robert McCullagh, a Church of Ireland clergyman, died of apoplexy on the day his twelfth child was born. Not to be flip, but I couldn't blame the fellow!

One of the most exquisite pieces of furniture we'd seen our entire time at the Ulster Folk Museum was this chest with its ornate detailing.

The guide said the first owner, a reverend, was evicted for non payment of rent. We were treated to some delicious soda bread the guide had made over the peat fire. She was kind enough to give me a copy of the recipe that had been printed in the town's print shop.

The upstairs bedroom:

I couldn't resist taking a photo of such a pretty street scene in the Ballycultra Town that had a collection of 38 buildings that had been dismantled from all over Ulster and reassembled outside of Belfast.

We could have taken a ride on the old jitney that made loops through the town where half of the museum's buildings were in close proximity.

Our last stop in town was the W. & G. Stationers and Printers where we watched the printer run off soda bread recipes and other flyers.

A visit to the Ulster Folk Museum made me truly appreciate how enormously comfortable our lives are compared to what so many so many people had to endure 150 plus years ago in parts of rural Northern Ireland. It almost defied imagination thinking how most of the buildings had been dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt here as all looked entirely natural, as if they'd been there forever! We were very appreciative of how many of the guides brought their region's history alive to us in a way no book ever could. Our visit was an unexpected highlight of our time in Ireland.

About a dozen miles east of Belfast was the picturesque seaside city of Bangor that we explored in the late afternoon. We walked to the marina and along the pier to examine the mosaics honoring the D-Day fleet that rendezvoused offshore in 1944 so they could escape the Nazi reconnaissance aircraft.

Tower House and the tower dated to 1637 and are believed to be the oldest building in Northern Ireland in continual public use. They were built in a Scottish baronial style when Bangor was developing as a town and port under a Scottish landlord during the reign of King Charles I.

As we looked for a place to have dinner in Bangor, we read with interest, and a little bit of trepidation, the signs on many restaurant and bar doors that limited what could be worn inside because of the ongoing tensions in Northern Ireland.

Our B&B in Belfast was a charming Victorian home with scads of interesting items and gorgeous furniture and Oriental rugs collected by the home's owners. The room was a decent size but we had barely an inch of space to lay down any of our own items. The bathroom was down a short flight of stairs but the breakfast each morning more than made up for those minor inconveniences!