Ulster Folk Museum

The Ulster Folk Museum showcases Ulster’s rural heritage with authentic buildings and live demonstrations, offering insights into traditional crafts and historical lifestyles.

Planning your visit

The Ulster Folk Museum at Cultra outside Belfast reconstructs the rural and small-town Ulster of roughly a century ago across a large open-air site: farmhouses, cottages, a church, a school, a printer, a forge, a bank and a terrace of town houses, all original buildings dismantled elsewhere in the province and rebuilt here.

Costumed interpreters work in the buildings — baking soda bread on a griddle over a turf fire, working the forge, printing — and the smell of turf smoke does more to convey the period than any label.

The regional distinctions in building are legible: thatch, whitewash, byre dwellings where family and cattle shared a roof, and the differences between poor and prosperous holdings.

It is paired with the Ulster Transport Museum on the same site, holding trains, trams, cars and the Titanic material, and the two are usually visited together.

The site is large and outdoors; allow half a day.

Bookable options are entry tickets. Current availability is shown below.