Marty McAuley Walking Tour | Belfast Whiskey Week 2024

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 23 Jul 2024
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/24/404

Some events ask you to sit down, settle in, and let the whiskey come to you. Session 42 at Belfast Whiskey Week 2024 had a different proposition entirely: lace up your shoes, meet Marty McAuley outside City Hall, and let Belfast itself be the venue. Equal parts walking tour, whiskey tasting, and seanchas session, this was one of the festival's most beloved and distinctly local offerings — and on a July Tuesday in 2024, it delivered everything it promised.

About This Event

There’s no easier way to put this: Put your comfy shoes on, dress for Belfast Weather, grab yer ticket and meet me at City Hall. I’ll be wearing clothes. Easy to find sure, with a Whiskey Week sign. Once all the stragglers get here - we’re off! Then it’s just me, you, and a handful of other chaps and lassies, as we dander about Belfast in search of good craic, good whiskey and good places to tell my stories. This walking tour is full of food, whiskies and me imparting the impartiality, expelling the experiences and holding forth the history of this Great Whiskey City. No need to eat before hand - I’ll feed and water you, promise - Marty McAuley

Looking Back

There is something quietly radical about taking a whiskey event outdoors, away from the candlelit hush of a tasting room or the polished mahogany of a hotel bar. Marty McAuley — guide, raconteur, and self-described feeder of the hungry — has been leading these wandering sessions through Belfast for long enough to have worn a groove in the city's pavements. Gathering at the front of City Hall, the group was a pleasing mix: seasoned whiskey heads, curious first-timers, and a few souls who had clearly taken Marty's advice about the comfy shoes seriously. Those who hadn't, learned quickly.

What made this session sing was the way it wove together the duchas of the place — the deep, living memory of Belfast as a whiskey city — with the pure pleasure of a good dander. Marty did not merely point at buildings and recite dates. He told stories. He made the cobblestones and cornerstones of the city speak to the uisce beatha tradition that runs through this tír like a thread through linen. The history he imparted was worn lightly, in the way that only someone who has truly absorbed it can manage. There was nothing lecture-hall about it; this was fireside knowledge carried out into the streets.

Food and whiskey appeared at intervals — true to Marty's word, no one went hungry or thirsty — and each dram arrived with context: a story, a connection, a reason to pause and consider. For those who wanted to go deeper into some of the liquid history that surfaced on the tour, the festival's own programme offered rich companions, including the Bushmills History MasterClass and the Bushmills Causeway Collection MasterClass, both of which filled in the archival detail that a dander through wet streets, however enjoyable, cannot quite accommodate.

At £15, Session 42 was arguably the best-value ticket at BWW 2024. It asked almost nothing of its participants beyond a willingness to show up, stay curious, and let a man who loves this city show you a version of it you had not seen before. The group that finished the tour was notably more animated than the one that had gathered nervously at City Hall — something about shared miles, shared stories, and shared whiskey will do that to people. Sláinte, Marty. Same time next year.

If the tour has whetted your appetite for Belfast's whiskey landscape, our Whiskey Map is a fine way to keep exploring the city at your own pace — every distillery, bar, and bottle shop worth knowing about, in one place.