Walking Georgian Birr: the malls, the square and the FAN Trail

Birr does not look accidental, because it is not. The Parsons family held the castle from 1620 and laid the town out from their demesne wall in formal blocks and tree-lined malls. That plan survives almost intact, which is why the town was designated a heritage town in 1993 and why an hour on foot here is worth more than an hour in most Irish towns of four or five thousand people.

The walk below is free, takes about an hour at a strolling pace, and covers the ground the Birr FAN Trail also uses. If you want the full trail, download the map from birrfantrail.ie first: the blue plaques are not numbered on the street in any obvious sequence.

Start at Emmet Square

The square is the middle of the town and the obvious place to leave a car, though it is pay and display. In the centre stands a Doric column that the FAN Trail's own list of the town's building dates puts at 1747. It was raised for the Duke of Cumberland after his victory at Culloden the previous year, designed by Sir Laurence Parsons with Samuel Chearnley, and it carried the duke's statue until the early twentieth century, when the statue came down. A plaque to Robert Emmet went on instead and the square was renamed for him in 1922. That sequence is a decent summary of what happened to a lot of Irish town squares.

Around the square: Dooly's Hotel, the Garda station, the post office and a butcher's. Melba's, the hotel's late-night room, is named for the soprano Dame Nellie Melba, who has a FAN Trail plaque of her own.

West along Oxmantown Mall

Oxmantown Mall dates from about 1816 and is the best single street in the town: lime trees down the middle, Georgian frontages either side, and the main gates of Birr Castle Demesne closing the western end. Birr Theatre and Arts Centre is on the Mall, in the Oxmantown Hall of 1888. A committee of townspeople decided in 1887 that Birr needed a hall that would suit everything from a Sunday school to a social tea party, and it opened on 15 January 1889 to a crowded house in the rain, with people turned away at the door. It carried the social life of the town until the 1980s, then lay idle. It was bought and restored by the town and reopened in July 2000, and it now seats 220.

Directly opposite is The Stables, whose tea rooms occupy the original drawing room of a Georgian house with the period joinery still in place. It is closed on Mondays, which is worth knowing before you plan a lunch around it.

The demesne wall and the river

Turn down Rosse Row at the castle gate and you are walking the outside of the demesne wall. The River Camcor comes through here on its way from the Slieve Bloom Mountains to meet the Little Brosna inside the walls. It is a spate river and rises fast after mountain rain, which is why it drove sawmills and corn mills in the nineteenth century and generated electricity for the town. The FAN Trail's own note on the Camcor suggests diverting off the route to walk part of the river through Mill Island and Camcor parks, and that is good advice: those are the town's free riverside walks and most visitors never find them.

Kelly's Bar on the Green sits about a hundred metres from the castle gate, which makes it the practical halfway stop. Four generations of the Kelly family have run it for over 140 years.

Back through the town centre

South from the Green into Main Street and the Marketplace, where the independent shops are and where Sanjay's Kitchen took Best Restaurant in Offaly at the Irish Restaurant Awards in 2025. Down to Wilmer Road for Birr Library, which is in the Gothic Revival building A.W. Pugin designed as a Convent of Mercy, built between 1846 and 1856 and bought by Offaly County Council in 1996. It holds a facsimile of the MacRegol Gospels, made in Birr around 800 AD, the original of which sits in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Check the library's opening hours before you plan on going in.

St Brendan's Church of Ireland, dated 1816 on the FAN Trail's building list and extended in 1876 by Sir Thomas Drew, closes the eastern end of Oxmantown Mall, and its east window was commissioned from Charles Kempe by the Fourth Earl of Rosse in 1891.

What the plaques are actually about

The FAN Trail commemorates 27 people and places, all of them famous or infamous in their day, with bilingual text. The cast is better than most heritage trails manage: Lord Snowdon, whose link to Birr came through his mother's remarriage to the Sixth Earl of Rosse; Bernadette O'Farrell, who left a bank manager's house here for Hollywood; Jim Connell, who wrote The Red Flag; Susan Langstaff Mitchell, the Red-headed Rebel of the literary revival; Alice Cashel, daughter of the Birr railway stationmaster, who joined Sinn Fein in 1907; three holders of the Victoria Cross; the site of William Cunningham's Hotel, where all 42 players of the first All-Ireland hurling final were entertained in 1888; and Kate Dunne, murdered after a cattle fair in 1886.

Go in winter if you can. The limes on the malls are bare and you can actually see the frontages.