Irish National Heritage Park

The park opened in 1987 on sixteen hectares beside the Slaney estuary and does something no indoor museum can: it builds the dwellings at full size, using the methods and materials archaeology indicates, and lets you walk into them. The sequence runs from a Mesolithic camp of around 7000 BC through Neolithic farmsteads, a portal dolmen, a stone circle, a Bronze Age cooking site with a working fulacht fiadh, an ogham stone, a ringfort with a souterrain, an early Christian monastery, a crannog on the water, a Viking boatyard with a longship, and a Norman motte and bailey, ending around 1169. Costumed interpreters demonstrate crafts and cooking at various points in season. It is outdoors throughout on woodland paths and boardwalks, so weather matters completely, and the reconstructions are informed interpretations rather than surviving buildings, which the park is clear about.

Highlights

• The nine thousand year sequence - Mesolithic camp through to Norman motte.
• The crannog - a reconstructed lake dwelling on the water.
• The Viking boatyard - with a longship under construction.
• The working fulacht fiadh - Bronze Age cooking demonstrated.

When to go

April to October, when the costumed demonstrations run and the paths are usable. It is entirely outdoors - heavy rain makes for a poor visit. Three hours for the full circuit.

Before you go

Everything is a modern reconstruction, not an excavated site. Entirely outdoors with long walking on woodland paths and boardwalks. Demonstrations are seasonal and not guaranteed. Ticketed.

Nearby

Wexford town is south; Curracloe and the Wexford Wildfowl Reserve are east.

Key facts