Contact our volunteer coordinator
If you would like to help for an hour, a day, or even more, please get in touch with our Volunteer Coordinator on 071 963 3013 or by email at info@strokestownpark.ie
- Tour guiding
- Supporting the visitor experience
- Acting as an ambassador at our events
- Contributing or collecting oral histories and reminiscences
- Conserving different aspects of our houses and gardens
- Furniture restoration
- Gardening and horticulture
- Composting
- Encouraging biodiversity
- Event planning and support
- Photography
- Marketing & Promotion
- Local community outreach
- And much, much more!
“Our families are really and truly suffering in our presence and we cannot much longer withstand their cries for food. We have no food for them, our potatoes are rotten and we have no grain”.
Events
Family-Friendly Fun at Strokestown Park
Check out our events calendar for things to do with kids at The National Famine Museum | Strokestown Park throughout the year.
Easter egg hunts, Winter Wonderland adventures, nature trails, and outdoor theatre performances are just some of the entertaining events on offer across the house and gardens on this impressive Roscommon estate!
Caring for Strokestown Park House and The National Famine Museum
Since 2015, The National Famine Museum | Strokestown Park has been managed by the Irish Heritage Trust. Its team, together with the wonderful volunteers and supportive partners who contribute to its projects, work tirelessly to conserve and preserve the fabric of the house and the history held within its walls. Together with the wonderful community around Strokestown Park House, we offer a warm welcome to visitors and scholars from across the world who are keen to learn about Strokestown Park and its remarkable stories.
Take a Self-Guided Tour
A mixture of imaginative scene-setting and innovative audio, audio-visual, and touchscreen resources – as well as our family activity guide – help to make a museum visit a fascinating, immersive experience for people of all ages. Our audio-guides are available in six languages: English, Irish, French, Spanish, German and Mandarin.
Encounter the voices of the famine through original documents produced by people whose lives were tied to the Strokestown Park Estate.
Discover what simple everyday objects, from farming tools to worn-out shoes, can tell us about the lived experience of famine at different levels of Irish society.
Learn about the political, social, economic, and environmental factors that played a part in the Great Irish Famine and contributed to its devastating human cost.
See Ireland’s complex past up close
- Explore the tenants’ experience of hunger, eviction, and exile, through voluntary and assisted migration.
- Engage with the landlord’s perspective, his power, dilemmas, and controversial assassination.
- Gain unique insights into a cataclysmic disaster that changed Ireland forever, creating a diaspora of Irish emigrants, forced to leave their homeland due to hunger, many of whom did not survive the harrowing journey.
Step into the Strokestown Park Schoolroom
By becoming a member of the Irish Heritage Trust, you are joining a community of people who share our passion for preserving the fabric of the properties we care for, along with the unique histories held within them.
Membership fees assist with meeting the ongoing costs of caring for historic estates, and they also support access to their stories and collections through museums, exhibitions, and archives open to the public and scholars of Irish heritage.
How Your Membership Helps the Irish Heritage Trust
By becoming a member of the Irish Heritage Trust, you are joining a community of people who share our passion for preserving the fabric of the properties we care for, along with the unique histories held within them.
Membership fees assist with meeting the ongoing costs of caring for historic estates, and they also support access to their stories and collections through museums, exhibitions, and archives open to the public and scholars of Irish heritage.
The wide avenue that approaches Strokestown was once the widest in Europe and still sets a spectacular scene.
Strokestown Park’s fine 18th-century galleried kitchen makes a wonderful location for period domestic drama.
The serene Roscommon landscape around Strokestown Park House offers an abundant choices of settings.
Visit the Strokestown Park Nursery
On a guided tour of Strokestown Park House, see the toys, books, and musical instruments in the beautifully preserved nursery – they create a magical sense of what a Victorian childhood was like in an aristocratic Irish family.
Step into the Strokestown Park Schoolroom
A world away from the modern classroom, get a glimpse of a past where obedience and formality won out over curiosity and fun.
You’ll get to see schoolbooks from times gone by and try out desks designed without comfort in mind too!
The National Famine Way App is available
on Apple and Android stores.
For more information go to www.nationalfamineway.ie or call +353 (0)71 963 3013.
Plans for the Future
Over the coming years, through major funding programmes and partnerships, we will carry out further work to conserve Strokestown Park and enhance its role in rural regeneration. Our aim is to fulfil The National Famine Museum | Strokestown Park’s potential as a local amenity, a national asset, and an international resource for learning about the Great Irish Famine.
We already working on bringing the house and community together through our new volunteering programme and successful events, such as the Plant Fair and Family Féte, which are bringing new audiences to the house and gardens.