Front Street in Ardara, in the west of Donegal. Whitewashed, black to about knee height, Charlie McHugh's name over the door and Nancy's on the board swinging off the wall.
Both names are correct, and the gap between them is the story.
Nancy was a widow
The bar was Charles McHugh's, and it carried his name because he owned it. He died young. His wife Nancy was left with the business and the children, and she ran the one while raising the other, and grew the place while she was at it.
The name on the front of the building never changed. The name people used did. Seven generations of the same family have had it since, and the pub is still called after the woman who kept it going rather than the man it was licensed to.
It happened again, more or less. In the early 1970s Margaret, mother of the current owner, took over after her own husband died, built the pub's reputation further, and filled the rooms with the antiques that are still in them. She is also the one who first put local oysters on.
Ann Barrett McHugh married Charlie in 1973 and started serving food some years after that: fresh local seafood, and a chowder recipe the kitchen still uses. She ran it for the guts of forty years before handing over to her eldest son Daniel, who is head chef.
What it is like
Small rooms, one leading into the next, packed with what four generations of the family collected rather than what a designer specified. It has been described as walking into your granny's good room, which is accurate and is meant kindly.
The food is the seafood. Ardara is twenty minutes from the coast in most directions.
Why we drew it
Because it is the plainest front in the series and it did not need much. Whitewash, a black plinth, two names, a swinging sign. Five colours was enough.
It is also the one that made us realise the Pub Series is not really about pubs. It is about who kept a building going, and quite often that turns out to be somebody whose name is not on the front of it.
Nancy's, Ardara, is in the Pub Series.
The Pub Series is a set of Irish pub fronts drawn one at a time. We go and look at the building, we read what we can find about it, and we say plainly which bits we could not verify.