15. The Golden Nugget

There’s gold in them thar hills up round Tyrone, and what better place to spend it than in The Golden Nugget Saloon, a bar so reminiscent of the Yukon goldfields that it comes as no surprise to learn that it was inspired by the film North to Alaska.

The designer of the Golden Nugget, and former owner, is well-known local businessman and cinema owner Phil Richardson, who adds that it was The Sound of Music that paid for it. Interestingly, Mr.Richardson’s brother spent some years in Alaska and supplied most of the genuine artifacts that originally decorated the bar, including snowshoes and the skin of a bear shot by his trapper father-in-law.
Some of these items remain, notably a Hudson Bay Company totem pole, and the skull of a bison, but everything about the Golden Nugget creates the mood and appearance of way out west, or more accurately, way up north.

The teak floor, wooden benches, large stone fireplace, table tops that are gigantic slices of locally felled elm trees, and timber walls all might have come straight from a conventional western saloon scene.
Even some of the locally obtained pieces echo this theme.

Worth mentioning is the Yukon scene painted by a local artist; the long wooden counter that before had pride of place in a grocer’s shop; the massive carved wood frame mirror from Baronscourt Castle; and last but far from least the chain-hung brass circles of oil lamps acquired – wait for it – from Langfield Church in neighbouring Drumquin.

The Golden Nugget was formerly the Abercorn Arms Hotel, and retains that legend outside above its new title, but whether you think of it as a saloon or a hotel you don’t need to have struck it rich to enjoy a drink at its homely bar.