Ireland Guide
Down and Armagh
The County Museum
Address: On the east side of the Mall
Website: www.armaghcountymuseum.org.uk
Opening time: Mon– Fri 10am–5pm, Sat 10am–1pm & 2–5pm
Price: Free
A former schoolhouse houses the County Museum, an old-fashioned museum with all the usual local miscellany on display, including an alarmingly vivid collection of stuffed wildlife, plus a little art gallery tucked away on the upper floor. Here there are twenty or so mystical pastels, oils and cartoon sketches by the Irish turn-of-the-century poet George Russell, a much-neglected companion to Yeats, who acquired the alias Æ as a result of a Dublin newspaper misprinting a letter that he had signed "Aeons". The prolific local artist J.B. Vallely is also represented with a superb oil showing five musicians enjoying a session; the theme of traditional music figures in more than three thousand of Vallely's canvases and, with his wife Eithne, he currently runs the town's Armagh Pipers' Club (their children are all well-known traditional musicians). Elsewhere, a display devoted to railway history recounts the story of Ireland's worst railway disaster, when two passenger trains collided outside Armagh in 1889, killing 89 people, many of whom are buried in nearby St Mark's churchyard.