Hedge School

Our Hedge School displays a reconstructed rural school setting, which were used illegally as a response to a ban on Catholic schools during the Penal Laws. During this time, travelling ‘hedgemasters’ would teach children subjects such as history and languages for a small fee, and the classes were often held in outdoor or informal settings.

These illegal schools served as the only means of teacher-led education for the native Irish until the middle of the nineteenth century, and our reconstruction attempts to recreate the experience of such a bygone way of learning.