Recently, I spent a week in a Bunk Campers’ campervan, traveling around Ireland trying to find the most unique and interesting things around the country.

My trip eventually led me to Jim O’ The Mills, a pub in Tipperary hidden in a family’s home, which only opens on Thursday nights. People from all over the country — and all over the world! — travel to Upperchurch, Co. Tipperary to meet Jim and his family and experience the magic of the Jim O’ The Mills experience.

The idea is that Jim O’ The Mills “calls to you”, and you arrive at the Mills’ household when it has called to you. It called to me when I found myself at the Donaghmore Famine Workhouse with the amazing tour guide & historian Michael Creagh and his dog Lily, and Michael told me all about the hidden pub with some of the best music in the country that only opens once a week. 

Two days later, on Thursday, I arrived at the pub in my campervan and parked nearby, a little up the road, as parking space was very limited in Jim’s driveway. Shortly afterward, a local man I would later find out is named Eugune, knocked on my window. “Are you going to Jim O’The Mills?”? he asked, waving around a torch that had made me think it was the police knocking on my door. “I am”, I replied, to which he said “Well, you better get there if you want to get a seat! It fills up quick!”

When I walked up to the door, right on the button of 8 pm, I was greeted with a red half-stable door leading into a room where an assortment of chairs faced a fledgling fire. One of Jim’s daughters brought me to the room with a decoration stating “PUB” and asked me what drink I wanted. The pub boasts a selection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks in glass bottles and cans, alongside one single Guinness pump.

The layout of the pub is three cosy rooms in total. The room with the chairs is for music and songs, the place where people bring fiddles and bodhráns and flutes and tin whistles and guitars and sing the night away, from rebel songs to local songs to famous Irish songs and everything in between.

The middle room, where a local man and his son-in-law took me under their wing on entry, is where people sit to chat in front of a roaring fire. The third room is the aforementioned pub, where people can sit at the bar or stand and chat.

Jim shared with me the story of the house, originally built as a mill, that eventually transformed into the home slash pub they share with the world only once a week. He shared his personal story of ending up as the current Jim O’ The Mill, after his great-grandfather, the original Jim O’ The Mill. He told me all about his “five girls”, who “grew up listening to the oul’ songs” played on Thursday nights. Watch the video above to see the full interview with Jim.

The pub is very reminscint of a Síbín (in English, ‘Shebeen’) of old, which was “an illicit bar or club where excisable alcoholic beverages were sold without a licence”. (Wikipedia).

My only regret from my time at Jim O’ The Mills was that I didn’t stay the night — Jim kindly extended the invitation to “park up, and come in for the breakfast in the morning!” but I had already booked into a campervan park earlier that day and felt I couldn’t cancel at midnight, much and all as I wanted to!