Dublin Literary Pub Crawl

 A street sign off of Grafton street directs you to the start of the pub crawl.

I’m going to skip ahead a little bit to talk about our last night in Ireland.

Based off of a recommendation of a relative and positive mentions in our Ireland guidebooks we had made reservations for the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. If you’re at all familiar with bar hopping then a pub crawl is basically the same thing; you’re led around from pub to pub where drinking alcohol is consumed. The twist with the Literary Pub Crawl is that the group is led by two local actors who drop knowledge on you about the different Irish writers that have come through these pubs, explain some of the inspiration behind their writing, act/recite writings from some of the authors, and give you history about Dublin between pints.

I don’t really have any type of background in literature or classical reading so signing up for this tour I knew was going to be a little different. Especially when we got to our first put of the night, The Duke, I could already tell this was the type of event where you wouldn’t get flat out drunk since there were a lot of people and we all here to be engaged by Irish writers.

Speaking of which, even though I’m not familiar with the works of Irish literary writers, I had heard of a few of the more “bigger names” from the group: William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce. Probably two Irish writers that most people might recognize are CS Lewis (who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia) and Bram Stoker (the writer of Dracula).

As I mentioned we started off the Literary pub crawl at The Duke. I wish I could tell you that I remembered most of the info why our two guides started us off here, but that information is now lost on me, as well of most of the reasons why we stopped at the places we did.

To get things started off we started upstairs in The Duke where our guides introduced themselves, provided witty banter, and acted out a scene from a play. Before this though we each purchased a half pint of Guinness to get the crawl started.

The literary pub crawl actors getting things started.

After The Duke we headed into Trinity College for a “culture stop” along our pub crawl. As our guides noted, along the pub crawl they will once and a while stop at locations outside of pubs at places of note to give more history and background on Irish literary history. This stop in particular they talked about the different writers that came through Trinity College. Mind you this is about 8:30 at night and we’re in the courtyard of Trinity College, it’s dark, it’s semi-cold, and there’s hardly anyone around.

After our stop at Trinity College we headed to O’Neill’s. We had twenty minutes our own in this massive pub to just sit, have drinks, and potentially eat. After the twenty minutes was up we headed outside to meet up with our group across the street in front of a church that was converted into a tourist office. while waiting for everyone to assemble we were asked to take a photo of a smaller group of people in our group. Being the friendly people we are we obliged and I took several photos of the group. They in turn took a photo of us in front of O’Neill’s:

Once assembled our guides did another history lesson in front of the church and acted out another scene from a play:

Then we continued on to the next pub, The Old Stand. Now, I do remember why we stopped at this particular pub. It was used by Michael Collins during the Irish revolution to meet British agents in secret. The name Michael Collins might sound familiar to you because it was the name of a film based on the man starring Liam Neeson in the mid-90s. Back in the day though, the pub was called The Monaco--one point on our Literary Pub Crawl quiz.

When we got to The Old Stand it was pretty packed and being the smaller of the three pubs we visited so far we didn’t elect to stay too long inside. After a long duration of waiting outside we decided to head back in and warm up a little. When we got back in, the group of people that we took a photo of invited us over to wait with them in the little corner that they had carved out in the pub. We got to talking and we found out they were a group of three couples, one from Texas, one from Massachusetts, and one from Germany.

After this it was onto our final pub of the evening. We actually ended up kind of where we started, a pub that was right across the way from The Duke called Davy Byrne’s. We actually stopped just to the left of the pub while our guides quizzed us on information from our crawl. Throughout the night they had given us key points of information that they would test us on at the end of the crawl. The person with the most correct answers they said would win a shirt. 

So they went through the quiz, people gave answers, and the t-shirt was won. Then our guides mentioned that wanted to try something seasonal reading for the tour since it was Valentine’s Day weekend (this was the Saturday after Valentine’s Day on Thursday) and they rather quickly asked for a volunteer from the audience. They chose a fellow from Denmark I believe (I can’t remember where exactly what country he was from) but he started reading this poem about love.

Now I thought it was rather suspicious that they chose the guy that they did super quickly and it was my feeling that we were about to see a marriage proposal. Anyway, the guy is reading this really great poem about love and women and you could already sense what was about to happen. Sure enough when he got to the end he apologized to everyone in the group and said that he had to say the last portion in his native language. The dude then proceeds to bring his girlfriend aside brings out a square box and proposes to her right there in front of our entire pub crawl group. Needless to say this was a pretty awesome way to end the pub crawl--a first in its history from what we were told (sorry no pics).

If our night had ended there, it would have been a pretty good night. Despite the fact that we were both starving as we hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. However, after tipping our guides, the people that we had taken photos of earlier in the night invited us back to have drinks with them. Since they had already bought us drinks it was hard for us to refuse.

What happened next I can only describe as something that happens in movies. For the next three hours we became fast friends with these people we had just met, had drinks and shots with them, introduced each other and where we were from, and basically talked story to the wee hours of the morning and basically shut the pubs down. 

The whole time it we were carrying on I just couldn’t believe we had found this really cool group of people from all over the place to hang out and talk with. As we continued on I began to get worried since we hadn’t had anything to drink and we were consuming a good amount of alcohol. At a certain point we finally decided it might be a good idea to  grab something to eat. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) the only place that was serving food at that late hour was the one and only Burger King. Yes, Burger Kind. Flying half way around the world and the only thing open within walking distance was the BK lounge. How fitting. Better still, after we got in there and ordered our food, they started playing Born in the USA by The Boss himself.

After our late night dinner we headed back to The Duke for one last drink and to cap off the night with some great conversation. Thankfully we wound things down before they got out of control. Part of this was that the pubs close at 12:30 and we had no where else to go. Once we finished our drinks we said our goodbyes and headed on our ways.

Looking back on it now, there was no way I could have predicted how our night was going to turn out at the beginning of the night. Like I said, it almost seemed something like out of a movie on how we clicked so well with the people that we met on our pub crawl. It will definitely be one of the most memorable experiences I will take away from our trip to Ireland.