A real old superpub

The woman in the grocery store in Redcross village says that Cullen's Pub doesn't open until around eight o'clock. Or sometimes nine o'clock. Or it could even be ten. I'd really have to come back and see. John Cullen has been running it on his own since his brother died and he also has the farm to look after. So there are evenings when he mightn't open at all.

Only on a third visit was it open. When you enter Cullen's you step immediately onto a floor that is just a large surface of cold concrete. The air is like that inside a tomb – musty, moist and cool. Paint crumbles from the walls, names of young couples are scratched into the plaster and the woodwork around the bar has been scuffed and kicked from boots that swung from barstools. To the right, a lounge area with a few parish hall chairs, a fireplace filled with dry logs and a piano sit in an otherwise vacant room. Ahead, a short corridor leads to a larger room with the same furniture and a bulky stove, caged in, as if it had grown unmanageable in its advanced years. The door to the right is an exit to a yard that houses toilets as well as several barking dogs, the door firmly shut with a bolt as thick as a 60-ring gauge Cuban cigar.

Behind the bar, plastic crates and wooden boxes filled with beer bottles are stacked in crooked piles, some with their destinations stamped in a bold black print: Daly's of Cork. A long way from home, they are, and likely to be the few remaining of their kind. There was, in the 1950s, a John Daly group in Carrigrohane, Co Cork. A large wine and spirit wholesalers, who later moved into a Coca-Cola franchise. But it's unlikely they still use wooden crates. An apron, a curled price list and a few ashtrays for change are the only other items that betray the building as a bar that was once busy; once a changing station for horses and carriages, the yard out the back alive with the sound of horses' hooves. Now the only sound is the sniffing of the dogs under the door, hoping to get a bite of this stranger's ankles.

Years ago, six of us, most of us not yet at the legal drinking age, arrived in Redcross with a tent. We stuffed ourselves in the chipper at the local campsite and chanced our arms getting served in Cullen's. We were successful. Warm beer straight from the crate. Saturday night and the bar, all three rooms, were hopping.

People sat on upturned beer crates and old school chairs. The piano lid was raised and the keys were pounded. An accordion joined in. Then a guitar. Then a fiddle. Rings whizzed over our heads at the board on the wall behind us. People were singing, ballads and folk songs. They thumped the floorboards and whacked the sides of the crates – wooden and plastic. We joined in and guzzled the beer and the two brothers, by ten o'clock, were in a lather of sweat. The ashtrays were full and the crates were getting empty, providing more seats for the bodies that fell in the door.

By midnight, all six of us had been sick as brutes. The warm beer left behind us in the cold grey toilet at the back of the yard, the barking of the dogs at our heels, the ringing of the ballads in our ears. But it had been one the greatest nights you could possibly have had in a pub. And we never returned again, just to make sure that it stayed good.

This evening, the piano is silent. Old Cullen gives me a beer and refuses to take any money for it. It was quiet last night, and the night before that, he says. But the night before that it was busy. The campsite had turned the chipper into a bar and restaurant, so that takes a lot of the crowd. I tell him I had been here about 20 years ago or so and he nods as if to say "do you really expect me to remember?"

I ask him if the musicians still come here on a Saturday night like they used to. "They're all dead," he tells me. There's not much you can say after that, so I have a look round.

The building, from front room to back, has the appearance of a fading photograph. You almost expect the corners to come curling in on top of you. Everything is on its way out, washed in vanishing mid-tones of chalky grey – the tabletops, walls and floors. It has the pallor of death.

The door opens and a couple of guys enter. German by the sounds of it. They order a few bottles of beer to take away and look in wonder as old Cullen picks up a jotter and spends what seems an eternity doing a tot and working out the change from a €20 note.

I returned once after that on a Friday night with a few friends for a quick drink and to see if the place was again empty. It was. John Cullen occupied the same spot and had the same jotter to calculate the round of drinks. Up the road, the campsite was brimming and the restaurant was full. People sat outside their mobile homes and tents and played stereos and lit barbecues, sipping cans of beer under heated lamps. Maybe I felt that bit more of an attachment to Cullen's pub because it was the first pub that I had got sick in, but I really wondered: what was it that kept these and other people away?

tom galvin