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Bunratty Castle on County Clare’s River Ratty is among Ireland’s most visited tourist attractions. The castle’s location, not far from Shannon Airport, suits it to organised coach tour itineraries. It presents a "medieval castle banquet experience" twice nightly, year round. Guests can wander round the castle’s adjoining Folk Park while they wait for the festivities to begin.
If you’re looking for tourist-style frolics, fine – the Bunratty show may be a bit corny but it’s fun. The entertainment is aimed unashamedly at visitors and is organised by Shannon Castle Banquets, which offers similar entertainment at two other locations in the West of Ireland -- Knappogue Castle at Quin in County Clare and Dunguaire Castle at Kinvara in County Galway.
After heading up Bunratty’s spiral stone staircase, you emerge in a large vaulted room decorated with hanging tapestries, to be greeted by the sounds of the Bunratty Singers playing harp and violin. You get to sample honey mead (a sweet, honey-flavoured fermented wine), served in an earthenware goblet. Mead was all the rage in the Middle Ages and it packs quite a punch, particularly if you manage to score two or three goblets in quick succession. It’s the kind of drink that caused knights to nod off inside their suits of armour.
After being welcomed to Bunratty by the Fear an Ti (the man of the house – in this case the great "Earl of Thomond", played by an actor in period costume), you and about 140 other guests (all tourists and mostly Americans) are ushered into the Great Barn, a vast, cathedral-sized room set with wooden tables and chairs.
Here, music, songs and entertainment are accompanied by "medieval-style" food – namely salad, spare ribs, Irish stew, apple tart, soda bread and traditional barm brack, a sort of yeasty bread, all accompanied by plenty of wine.
How does this compare with the real thing? The barm brack is authentic, but genuine medieval banquets tended to be loaded with heavy fare such as roast pig bladders, oxen on spits, vats of tripe and goats heads stuffed with apples, all garnished with various types of offal. The Bunratty menu has been modified to suit modern palates. In another dispensation to modern times, "the Earl" asks guests not to smoke in the castle.
“The tobacco so recently introduced by Sir Walter Raleigh" should not be consumed on the premises, the Earl declares.
It’s true nobody smoked in the Middle Ages. Sir Walter – who
introduced tobacco to Europe from North America – hadn't then been
born. The only smokers in Medieval times were heretics being burned at
the stake. The practice damaged their health even more than smoking cigarettes.
During the Bunratty meal, a guest is selected to act as lord of the evening's
entertainment, deciding whether the minstrels are up to scratch, or whether
they should be hanged, flogged, gibbeted, beheaded or stretched on the
rack.
Generally, the music gets the thumbs up (rather than the thumbscrews). The audience is invited to sing along with the minstrels – but if you think this means you will be asked to trill medieval madrigals to the accompaniment of lutes, think again. During my visit, the song that really got the audience roaring was Take Me Out to the Ball Game, America's baseball anthem, written in 1908 and famous for its lyric: “Root, root, root for the home team; if they don't win it's a shame”. It's anyone's guess what medieval knights would have made of that!
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