Take the road east out of Kinsale, past the marina, up the hill, and keep going after it stops looking like it leads anywhere. It drops down to the water at Summercove, under the walls of Charles Fort, and the last building before the harbour is orange the whole way up.
That is The Bulman. It has been there since the 1800s, and it sits about ten feet from the sea.
What is actually there
It is a mariner's pub and it does not have to work at being one. Wooden beams, a bronze-coloured ceiling, maritime pictures on the walls, and window seats that look straight out at the water. Sailors, coastguards and merchants drank there for most of two centuries before anybody thought to call it characterful.
The detail that stopped us is on the outside. Two men are painted full length, one either side of the main door, standing under the flower baskets: Hugh O'Neill and Don Juan d'Aquila. The Irish commander and the Spanish one, from the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. Four hundred and twenty-five years later they are still at the door of a pub, two miles from where the thing happened, holding up hanging baskets.
The kitchen is Toddies, and the food is what the harbour gives it: oysters, crab, lobster, whatever came in.
The thing we could not find out
We went looking for where the name comes from and could not settle it. There is a Bulman buoy out at the mouth of Kinsale harbour, and the obvious assumption is that the pub took its name from the mark. We could not find anyone who writes that down as fact rather than repeating it, so we are not going to write it down either.
If somebody in Summercove knows, we would like to be told.
Why we drew it
Because of the colour. Orange the whole way up, purple around the door, and a figure in gold on the gable that has been watching the harbour a long time. Most Irish pubs that photograph well do it with a black front and gold lettering. The Bulman does not bother.
We painted it flat and straight on, the way you remember a building rather than the way a camera takes it. Six colours, hand-laid, brush marks left in.
The Bulman, Kinsale, is the first print 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.