The Brazen Head, Historic pub in Merchant's Quay, Dublin, Ireland
The Brazen Head is a pub in Merchant's Quay featuring three interconnected rooms with stone walls and timber beams that convey historical character. An enclosed cobblestone courtyard provides an outdoor gathering space sheltered from the street.
The Brazen Head stands on a site occupied since at least 1613, when a messuage called the Brazen Head was recorded on Bridge Street; it received a licence to sell ale in 1661 and was first mentioned as an inn in 1668. The present building replaced a large timber house in 1754, and by April 1765 the inn held thirty rooms, a kitchen, cellar, scullery and stabling.
The pub appears in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and musicians such as The Dubliners, Van Morrison, Paolo Nutini and Tom Jones have performed here. A pane of glass halfway up the staircase carries a message engraved by the Waterford highwayman John Lonergan, recording that he halted there on 7 August 1786.
The pub stands on Lower Bridge Street, on the south bank of the Liffey near Merchant's Quay, a short walk from Dublin's city centre. The building is a former coaching inn, so rooms and stairs are old and narrow; visitors should expect tight quarters rather than level access.
The 1989 excavation took place on land next to the pub, not beneath it, and found 13th-century wicker mats, a post-and-wattle wall and medieval pot sherds from reclaiming the riverside marsh. The Brazen Head is absent from H.B. Clarke's map of medieval Dublin, though a "substantial building" called Carles Inn stood in the area.
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