Ulster Folk and Transport Museum

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The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum is situated in Cultra, Northern Ireland, about 6 miles east of the city of Belfast. It is comprised of two museums, the Folk Museum and the Transport Museum, and endeavours to illustrate the way of life and traditions of the people in Northern Ireland, past and present. The museum ranks among Ireland's foremost visitor attractions and is a former Irish Museum of the Year.

1 History
2 The Folk Museum
3 The Transport Museum
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

Created by an act of parliament in 1958, the Folk Museum was created to preserve a rural way of life in danger of disappearing forever due to increasing urbanisation and industrialisation in Northern Ireland. The site the museum occupies was formally the Estate of Sir Robert Kennedy, and was acquired in 1961, with the museum opening to the public for the first time three years later in 1964. In 1967, the Folk Museum merged with the Belfast Transport Museum, to form the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. The museum's Rail and Road Galleries were opened in 1993 to much acclaim, and subsequently expanded in 1996.

[edit] The Folk Museum

Traditional Irish buildings at the museum

The Folk Museum houses a variety of old buildings and dwellings which have been collected from various parts of Ireland and rebuilt in the grounds of the museum, brick by brick. 60 acres are devoted to illustrating the rural way of life in the early 1900s, and visitors can stroll through a recreation of the period's countryside complete with farms, cottages, crops, livestock, and visit a typical Ulster town of the time called "Ballycultra", featuring shops, churches, and both terraced and larger housing. Regular activities include open hearth cooking, printing, needlework, and traditional Irish crafts demonstrations. The museum is currently undergoing expansion, with the addition of a picture house, hardware shop, drapers, chemists, weaving shed and a period tea room. This is being partly funded by Heritage Lottery and Peace II grants, and is estimated to be complete in 2007.

Indoors, the Folk Galleries feature a number of temporary exhibitions including They Love Music Mightily, an exhibition featuring contemporary recordings of Irish traditional music, and Meet the Victorians, a lively and colourful exhibition on aspects of Victorian life.

The Museum is the holder of Northern Ireland's main film, photographic, television and sound archives. The Museum holds the BBC Northern Ireland archive of radio and television programmes, and also possesses over 2,000 hours of sound material broadcast between 1972 and 2002 by the Irish language radio station RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, from its studios in Derrybeg, County Donegal. The museum also maintains an archive of Ulster dialects, and a large library containing over 15,000 books and periodicals. The archives and library are open to the public during office hours.

[edit] The Transport Museum

Maedb, a locomotive housed at the museum

The Transport Museum houses an extensive transport collection, and endeavours to tell the story of transport in Ireland, from its early history to the modern era. It is the largest railway collection in Ireland, and one of the largest transport collections in Europe. Attractions in the grounds themselves include a model railway operated by the Model Engineers Society of Northern Ireland, and the 120 ton steel schooner Result.

The Irish Railway Collection tells the story of over 150 years of railway history. Steam locomotives, passenger carriages and goods wagons are combined with extensive railway memorabilia, interactive displays and visitor facilities. These include an award-winning computer game and children's play area. One of the collection's main attractions is Maedb, the largest and most powerful steam locomotive ever to be built and run in Ireland. Alongside the Irish Railway Collection are the new Road Transport Galleries, which boast a large collection of vehicles ranging from cycles and motorcycles, to trams, buses, and cars. One of its most famous attractions is a De Lorean DMC-12 car, the model made famous by the Back to the Future trilogy, and manufactured by the De Lorean Motor Company in Belfast.

The museum boasts a permanent Titanic exhibition, documenting the construction, voyage, and eventual sinking of the ill-fated vessel. The ship has long been associated with Northern Ireland, as it was constructed in the Harland and Wolff shipyards, just a few miles from the museum. A more recent exhibition at the Transport Museum is X2: Flight Experience, developed in partnership with Bombardier Aerospace, owners of the Belfast-based aerospace company Short Brothers. The exhibition aims to enable young visitors to discover for themselves the principles of flight, explore the history of aviation, and understand the process of making a successful aircraft. Also on display at the museum is the Short's manufactured SC1, a prototype vertical take-off aeroplane, only two of which were ever produced (the other crashed during testing, killing its pilot).