A Long Time Ago, in Bunratty Village….

Today we visited the Bunratty Castle and learned lots of interesting facts about the defence of the castle and bits of information about the castle itself.  To learn more information about the defences of Bunratty Castle, click here to read Zoe’s post. After visiting the castle, we walked around the village that surrounded it.

It was a pioneer village, so all the houses had fire places, no bathrooms (they had public washrooms, but no flushing toilets in the village houses), and no electricity. In a few of the houses when we were there, they were making bread that they cooked by the fire with butter that they churned in a near-by house. There were also a few old-fashioned mills where they used to grind corn and wheat.

The person who worked in the mill told us many stories.  One of them was about couples, who had beautiful flagstones for the floors in their homes.  It seems, hundreds of years ago, when couples were getting married, guests would bring them a piece of flagstone for a wedding present, and by the end of the night, the house would have a stone floor! He also said that if there was a girl in the village who was single, the door of her parents’ house would be painted blue, and when the girl was married, the door would be re-painted red. This particular man had seven daughters, so his door was blue for a long time!  He just recently painted it red!

One of my favourite houses had been owned by the Hughes Brothers who started a dairy, and later started an ice cream brand called HB, so there were people selling HB ice cream in the house. It was pretty good ice cream!

My favourites were the animals. There were roosters that crowed a lot really loudly, chickens, ducks, really adorable little ponies, horses, donkeys, and these two massive Irish wolf hounds that were really friendly. In one house that we saw, there was a perch on the wall for the rooster to sit and wake everyone up, or just sit and crow. There were also a couple houses that had space for cows and chickens to live in the house because the family couldn’t afford a stable or chicken coop!

Irish Wolfhound

One of the donkeys.

This village really reminded me of Pickering Village Museum back at home that we always used to visit for school trips!