The Turlough Park Museum of Country Life is part of the National Museum of Ireland (the only branch to be situated outside Dublin) and occupies a new building which seems to be nestled into the terraced grounds of a Victorian estate near Castlebar, Co. Mayo. It's collections commemorate the everyday life of plain working people and celebrate that much of the drudgery, coarseness and hardship of rural life is now a thing of the past. A fine photograph of young women working on the pier at Port Magee, Co Kerry, circa 1900, for example, has a caption reminding us that these women spent the day gutting and salting fish, while standing barefoot among stinking entrails. Every single item in the museum - i.e., spinning wheel, dress and footwear, hunting and fishing and agricultural implements, domestic utensils, religious and educational materials, games and past-times, furniture, etc. - was at one time used. There are no replicas and very few display cases are used. Admiss! ion is free and guided tours can be arranged. Turlough Park House is a three-storey Victorian Gothic mansion designed in 1865 by Thomas Newenham DEANE, who also designed the National Museum in Kildare St., Dublin. It was bult for the FITZGERALD family, who had owned lands there since the 1650s. The estate takes its name from the lake on its grounds; a turlough is a lake that dries up in the summer. When the Fitzgeralds built the 1865 house, one of several they had lived in on the site, the river was dammed to fill the turlough as a year-round pleasure lake. Three rooms in the Victorian house have been restored for visitors and the lovely grounds contain an elegant glass-house with plants, but the main focus is the museum and on the life lived by the majority of Irish country people. The Folklore Commission was founded in the 1930s. They recorded people talking about their lives, took photographs and made simple documentary films. Thousands of volunteers collected folklore - stories, myths and beliefs - while others concentrated on obtaining objects used in daily life and the skills needed to produce them. They found that hands were never idle. Women of the Claddagh in Galway invented a special kind of basket that could be worn over their heads, leaving their hands free to work at their knitting as they walked to market. Attractive, walk-through museum displays include bellows and other implements of the blacksmith's trade and those of a shoemaker. One sees tongs in place over a cradle. Iron was regarded as a powerful protection against the supernatural; it was believed that tongs or other iron objects placed above a cradle would ward off fairies. Reels of film shakily shot in black and white give footage of men in a tiny currach attack a basking shark with their oars, tow the massive creature ashore, lift it by crane, and butcher it with sharp, hook-like knives. Another interesting exhibit is that of a schoolmaster and his school room, with large photographs of pupils on the walls. A short audio-visual film at Turlough Park with script written and narrated by poet Theo DORGAN, introduces the museum as the guardian of the memory of the Irish people and the daily life of rural ancestors. Excerpts, "Ireland of the Welcomes," Sept-Oct 2002.