For millennia, Irish folklore associated the river Shannon with sea monsters and the goddess of wisdom. But since the year 900, pilgrims pivoted to the river’s banks in search of different kinds of spirits.
Situated along the Shannon in Athlone, Ireland, is Sean’s Bar, which has welcomed kings, clan leaders, tourists, and small-town regulars over the course of its 1,125-year history. But it didn’t gain global recognition until 2004 when the Guinness Book of World Records named it the oldest pub in Ireland. Because no older bar has been discovered, it lays claim as the oldest bar in the world.
Timmy Donovan, manager at Sean’s Bar, says worldwide tourists and local regulars alike come in to drink a cold pint and observe a moment in history. But its early proprietors and patrons were most likely unaware of how lasting an impact their bar would have on Ireland’s culture.
The origin of Sean’s Bar dates back to 900 when Luain Mac Luighdeach founded an inn at a shallow point along the Shannon. Travelers would cross the river at that low point, so Luighdeach saw fertile ground there for business. The inn maintained enough traffic that the surrounding area eventually grew into the settlement Áth Luain, or the ford of Luian, which gradually became Athlone. For the following 200 years, kings and clan leaders were among the lodgers at Luighdeach’s inn.
Operation continued during the 1,100-year gap between the founding and colloquial recognition as the oldest bar, but the historic magnitude was only discovered through a routine renovation. When Sean Fitzsimons, who took ownership of the bar in 1970 and renamed the pub, decided to rip down old walls, the team discovered wattle-and-wicker walls, interwoven hazel sticks bound by horsehair and clay, that modern-day visitors can still see. They also unearthed coins from the mid-1600s — now on display at the National Museum of Ireland.
“As you’re walking through the bar from front door to back door, you notice the floor slopes the whole way through the bar,” says Donovan. “Going back to 900 when the pub was built, that was the original drainage system. Water would come in the front door, it’d go straight down that slope, and go out back and into the river Shannon.”
Discovering these artifacts — along with a book of all past owners allegedly beginning with Luighdeach — led Sean’s Bar to invite Guinness World Records to examine and date the bar.
“When you go to the Guiness Book of World Records, you do not give them a date,” says Donovan. “You give them all your information, everything you have dealing with the pub.”
After a few years of research, the Guinness Book of World Records named Sean’s Bar the oldest pub in Ireland with an official founding date of 900, which the National Museum of Ireland corroborated, according to Donovan.
Beyond pulling pint after pint, the staff at Sean’s draws visitors with frequent tours and nightly traditional Irish music sets. But maintaining a high volume of customers and public appeal requires blending the ancient with the contemporary, Donovan says.
“You want to keep it in its own traditional way, yet you have to move with modern times,” he says. “So, behind the scenes, it could be very modern, with your coolers, equipment, and everything, but the whole main bar is as it was built right back in 900.”
Sean’s Bar extends that commitment to history in its house line of whiskey. Donovan says he researched the ways Irish monks distilled some of the earliest versions of whiskey and then worked alongside distillers in Cork to imitate the early monks’ process, harkening back to the spirit’s roots as much as he could.
“We went back to the original monks to see what was available to [them] at the time to flavor the whiskey,” says Donovan. “But some of their flavors tasted bad. The master distillers were able to tell us, ‘Yes, you could use that.’ ‘You could use that.’ ‘That’s no good.’ That is how we formulate our whiskey. We took it right back to its origin.”
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