The place to be today, indeed the place to be as often as you are within shouting distance of it, is the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Cultra, County Down, just a few miles outside Belfast. The North showed us the way when it opened in 1964 this expansive about sixty acre mini countryside of buildings and farm layouts of another day. You can learn much about the history of a people you may read their literature, study their political and bit out account the way the ordinary folk lived, their houses, their furniture, the artefacts of their everyday life.
And, in rural context, how their farms were laid out, how they built their houses and how they looked after their animals.
There, in Cultra you will find a Tyrone hill farm, built on the slope you will find a national school of long ago, and more and more of the buildings that went to make the town and country landscapes a bank, a barracks, a barn, a church. The reason why today is important is that it sees the opening of the Ballyveaghmore Farm House, from around Kilkeel, County Down, and the launch of selected writings of Estyn Evans by the Lilliput Press of Dublin.
The invitation describes this farm as being of the Estyn Evans Exhibit, but surely the whole rolling, sixty acres, the solid, sturdy, authentic matter of factness of the whole, is Ireland's tribute to this great Welshman who became one of us. His books live on. Cultra is their perfect embodiment. Many of the buildings are of the original material, the bricks or stone carefully dismantled, numbered and replaced on the new site. A few have had to be replicated.
The Ballyveaghmore Farm, thatched, was built in 1840 by Joe Baird. The last of the name died there in 1991. No mains water ever, no electricity. Just the well, candles and oil lamps.
Interesting aspect, there are still receipts for some of the furniture which comes to Cultra after more than a century. Old documents of various kinds, and stone working tools. The two storied hayloft and byre will be replicated.
But more. The Transport part of the establishment has vast rail way remains, including Maeve, a steam locomotive built in Inchicore in 1939 which ran until 1958, and road vehicles galore. That's another day's work.