The Hole In The Wall Bar Armagh, one of the City of Armagh’s historic venues…..
A great bar to watch the six nations & ulster games,
Email: theholeinthewallbar@btconnect.com
Telephone: 028 3752 3515
The hole In The Wall Bar
9 Market St
Armagh
County Armagh
BT61 7BW
Until the present Court House was erected at North end of the Mall in 1809. Justice was dispensed in the Sessions house situated in Market Street facing the Market House.
It was apparently built by 1615 as its mentioned as the meeting place of an inquisition commissioned a year earlier.
The Armagh historian James Stuart in his “Historical Memoirs of the City of Armagh” published in Newry in 1819 described the old Goal under it as, “A dismal suite of subterraneous apartments, directly under the sessions house. A flight of stone stairs led down to these gloomy caverns, where debtors and felons suffered a kind of semi-inhumation, the wards of this doleful dungeon were not only arched over with heavy and solid mason-work abutted in front and rear walls of seven feet thickness, but encircled and completely secured with a kind of massy reticulated iron work”, that is a strong iron fence.
So dark and bleak and strongly protected was this prison that it became popularly known as, “The Hole in the Wall” and the name has remained in common currency right down to the present day although the goal was moved to the south end of the Mall in 1780.
Today the building, greatly altered over the years, offers not misery and disgrace, but hospitality and good cheer.
