A love of fiddles and Irish tunes drew me back to Ireland and to trad sessions—those toe-tapping, hand-clapping, pint-sipping Irish events when musicians gather in pubs to play traditional tunes.
I was in search of the best—or at least the sessions I like best based on no particular expertise. I enlisted two music-loving Irish friends, Clare and Dermot, to join me on a journey that took us across the north of Ireland to the wilds of County Donegal in the Republic.
Sometimes haunting, mostly joyful, traditional tunes can shift from uplifting to heartbreaking in a note. The roots of trad go back 2,000 years to the arrival of Celts on the island, but trad sessions as we know them today date only to about the 1940s.
While there’s rarely dancing and only occasional ballads—tunes, not songs, are the foundation of trad—tapping, clapping, drinking, chatting, and laughing are always in play. The pubs we visited delivered all of that and more and evoked their own singular vibe, too.
Northern Ireland
Belfast
Belfast was the gateway for my journey, a city that’s easy to fall in love with. Neither contemporary culture nor volatile history fully defines it. Some Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods are still divided by walls and tensions are palpable at times, yet Belfast has much for visitors.
We overnighted at Harrison Chambers of Distinction, a fanciful boutique hotel in a landmark Victorian residence in the city’s leafy Queen’s Quarter, and chose Madden’s for our trad session, a good old pub where the boozy camaraderie is sometimes louder than the music.
Yet the music still had the power to draw me in.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of community and camaraderie to trad sessions. Young musicians learn from those more experienced, and strangers of all ages are invited to join in. If they don’t know a tune, they listen until they have it down or wait for the next one.
Although the crowd around us that day paid only intermittent attention to the music, it was one of the sessions I liked most, in part because it epitomized everything trad sessions can be—a celebration honoring traditional Irish music shared with patrons of all ages and types crowded into cozy dimly lit corners of pubs steeped in history.
Derry (Londonderry)
The only completely walled city left in Ireland, Derry is rich in history, culture, and, of course, music. After checking into historic Bishop’s Gate Hotel, Clare and I went searching for music on Waterloo Street, a cobbled lane lined with pubs, music of every type spilling from their doors.
The trad session that evening was at An Beár Beag, a cozy place with plush seating and a portrait of Ireland’s Nobel laureate poet, Seamus Heaney, on the wall, giving it a sophisticated air not typically associated with pubs.
We settled into comfy upholstered chairs as three musicians played—fewer than the 10 or 15 that often show up on trad nights but no less inviting. Then came a bonus.
A woman, clearly trained as a dancer, left her seat, spoke briefly with the musicians, and took to the floor, stepping and spinning to a spirited tune. You never know what a trad session will bring.
During the day we explored the city in a variety of ways. First, we joined one of the Martin McCrossan daily walking tours atop the 400-year-old walls to learn about Derry’s past and present, then headed to The Tower Museum for a comprehensive overview of life in Derry since its founding in 546 AD.
We found some of the filming sites of Derry Girls, the hilarious Netflix comedy about coming of age in Derry during the Troubles, and crossed the inspiring Peace Bridge for an excellent dinner at Walled City Brewery.
But it’s the emotionally powerful Free Derry Museum that stays with me, its visceral account of Bloody Sunday, the 1972 massacre of 28 unarmed civilians by British soldiers, wrenching and incomprehensible.
County Antrim
Less than an hour from Derry, Crosskeys Inn is Ireland’s oldest thatched-roofed pub. Opened in 1654, its warren of low-ceilinged rooms with weathered beams and worn stone floors evokes a portal to the past.
We sipped beer in a cozy, candlelit space with a massive hearth while waiting for the musicians. Unlike most trad sessions, this group included distinctly nontraditional music in the mix and an instrument we didn’t see at any other pub—a harp.
Trad sessions typically include a fiddle (or three), Irish flutes, tin whistles, uilleann pipes, and bodhrán drums, a notoriously hard-to-play Celtic instrument pre-dating Christianity. The harp was a melodic addition.
Nearby towns allowed me to indulge my love of literature and gin—not at the same time. Seamus Heaney HomePlace in Bellaghy celebrates the poet and the landscape of his childhood.
Outside the center, Clare and I followed a boardwalk across the flower-filled, marshy land Heaney wrote about so eloquently.
Meanwhile, gin has become super popular in Ireland, so we booked a class at Woodlab Distillery in Moy to learn the science of the spirit, but mostly to create our own proprietary recipe by testing different combinations of infusions.
We did a fine job. A few days later, we picked up our one-of-a-kind gin, ready for sunset cocktails.
County Donegal, The Republic of Ireland
There was little indication that we crossed from Northern Ireland into the Republic on our drive to Donegal, except that road signs were suddenly in Irish and wholly unpronounceable to those of us unfamiliar with the language.
Ireland’s northernmost county, Donegal, feels remote, not just in its wild beauty and rural ethos, but also in its cultural distance from the modern world. Peat is still cut and collected by locals to heat homes (and rentals), and farming and sheep are still a way of life.
We stayed the first four nights in a white-washed cottage on a small lane across from fields of wildflowers and woolly, black-faced sheep. It was there in Gaoth Dobhair (sounds like Gweedore), cradled between Mount Errigal and the sea, that I encountered the unbending rules of trad.
At the village of Bunbeg, the rugged Atlantic coastline softens into grassy, undulating dunes. On a sunny afternoon, we sauntered across a broad beach to inspect the skeleton of an unlucky fishing boat made famous by photographers chronicling its disintegration since 1977.
Best Accommodations in Donegal
We explored town, ducking into shops and pubs, then just before 10 p.m., we entered the cozy interior of Teach Hiúdaí Beag, a pub devoted to keeping trad music flourishing. A cheerful crowd filled the place until tables became shared space with strangers and the dimness seemed to lift with the first notes.
Owner Hugh Gallagher alternated between keyboard and fiddle, the musicians a mix of regulars and visitors.
One young woman played a lovely fiddle solo, but I soon learned it was all wrong. “It wasn’t trad,” Gallagher fumed during a break, a cloud of cigarette smoke floating around him. That, it turns out, is an unpardonable sin on trad night.
While trad was the goal, one pub made my “best” list not for its music but for its stellar fish and chips. That’s not to suggest that Leo’s Tavern in Crolly doesn’t have trad cred.
It has more than most, given that it’s owned by the musically gifted family of Irish singer Enya, and musicians come from all over the world to play there.
With no trad session the evening we stopped in, I had to be satisfied with an excellent ale and a plate of fish and chips so deliciously perfect we returned another day to have it for lunch in the cozy back room by the hearth. Next time, I’ll go for the music.
An excellent way to explore County Donegal is via the Wild Atlantic Way, which skirts the coast for 1,600 miles from Donegal’s Inishowen Peninsula to Kinsale in County Cork.
Best Donegal Tours & Excursions
In between, it passes through counties Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Clare, Limerick, and Kerry. The not-for-the-faint-of-heart route winds atop daunting cliffs edging deep bays and boulder-strewn shores far below, and offers several must-see stops along the way.
Sliabh Liag (Slieve League) is a designated Signature Discovery Point of the Wild Atlantic Way, one of just three in Donegal. Often wrapped in creeping fog and pelted with rain, the nearly 2,000-foot sea cliffs beckon visitors for the glorious views in any weather.
It was July when Clare and I followed the relatively easy path up to the lookout, bent against bone-chilling rain and wind. The sky brightened briefly for photos, but none captured the profound beauty of Sliabh Liag even in gloomy weather. In my memory, though, the power and beauty of the place loom large.
An hour inland, Glenveagh National Park encompasses a vast terrain of mountains, lakes, and glens, as well as a castle and lush Victorian gardens. Part of Mount Errigal lies within the park, but the trailhead for Donegal’s highest peak is outside it.
We traversed bridges, gullies, mud, scree, and a trickling stream on the moderately easy first section of the trail, but left the summit ascent for serious hikers well prepared.
Olde Glen Bar
To step into Olde Glen Bar is to breathe history. The faint scent of long-ago whiskey and ale served in the dark, squat interior since 1768 hangs in the air and in the weathered beams, crooked floors, and old bar worn unevenly by centuries of elbows.
It’s my favorite Donegal pub. Olde Glen sits just a few miles from Downings, a Gaeltacht village on the Rosguill Peninsula where Irish culture still thrives, but it does not exist entirely in the past.
We booked rooms at Clara’s Cots, the contemporary bed-and-breakfast next door, and tucked into a superb chef-driven dinner in the airy restaurant behind the pub. But it’s the old bar that draws trad lovers.
Sitting at a table across from the circle of four to ten players that ebbed and flowed as musicians came and went, I immersed myself in the now familiar tunes, content in this place where ancient history, enduring tradition, and music to stir the soul are bound one to the other, timeless and, I imagine, forever.
Olde Glen Bar was the perfect ending to our Donegal adventure.
In their own way, every pub we visited was perfect. Each one offered a perfect way to spend time in Ireland—time listening to music, sipping an ale, honoring tradition, and perhaps most important, time embracing the concept of craic, Irish for a good time. Nothing is better or more Irish than that.
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Author Bio: Colorado-based Christine Loomis is a freelance writer and editor who covers travel, culture and lifestyle. She’s been on staff at multiple national magazines, including two stints as editor-in-chief. She writes frequently for AAA publications and contributes to outlets including TravelAge West, Discover by Silverseaand Corporate & Incentive Travel magazine. Her work has also appeared in two anthologies, including The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11 (2017). She’s a long-time member of SATW (the Society of American Travel Writers).
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