Pub signs are visual storytellers. Long before standardized branding, signs identified establishments through images and symbols rather than words. This tradition allowed travelers of different languages, and those who could not read, to find a welcome, a meal and a bed for the night.
Walk through any Irish town and the signs still do their work: a hanging board, a gilded name over the door, a painted glass window. Many carry the year the house was established, a quiet boast that the place has outlasted the people who first drank in it.
The flower baskets, the brass lamps and the chalkboards are part of the same language. They tell you what kind of house it is before you cross the threshold, and they have been telling travelers the same thing for a very long time.
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