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heritage · Friday 18 September 2026 · 4:00pm 
Culture Night in Cootehall: A Celebration of Memories
At McGahern Barracks Museum · Cootehall, Co. Roscommon
At McGahern Barracks Museum · Cootehall, Co. Roscommon
Cootehall’s Culture Night event turns McGahern Barracks Museum over to the community for an evening of photographs and shared memories. It runs on Friday, 18 September 2026, as Cootehall’s contribution to the national Culture Night programme, when venues across Ireland open free of charge for one night. The barracks itself is a fitting setting: restored as a small museum, it was the childhood home of novelist John McGahern, whose father served as the local Garda sergeant here, and the building now holds his family’s story alongside the wider history of the village.
The evening centres on Martin Heron’s Scrim Sketches, a display exploring the barracks and its surrounding area, shown alongside photographic displays drawn from the local community. Visitors are invited through the building’s rooms, with the focus less on formal exhibition-going and more on neighbours and returning visitors swapping stories and pointing out faces and places in the photographs on the walls. Since reopening, the barracks has already drawn several hundred visitors, a good number of them people with direct family or personal links to the building, and Culture Night is designed to bring that same mix of curiosity and connection together in one evening. Entry is free, in keeping with Culture Night’s national format of open-door, no-ticket events running from late afternoon into the evening.
Cootehall is a small village on the River Boyle, a short drive from Boyle town and from Carrick-on-Shannon across the county boundary in Leitrim. The barracks is in the village itself, easily found on foot once in Cootehall.
Cootehall’s literary connection runs deeper than the barracks alone. The village and its river were part of the landscape John McGahern wrote about throughout his life, and a quiet walk along the Boyle river gives a sense of the place that shaped his fiction. There is more to see in Cootehall and across Co. Roscommon.
Heading to McGahern Barracks Museum in Cootehall? Roscommon has plenty more to see. Read the Cootehall area guide, find what else is on, and explore the towns and villages nearby.