The first package tourists: Rare slides show Irish travellers at the Pyramids in the late 19th century



They are perhaps the world's quintessential tourist destination.



And things were no different for the 19th-century Irish holiday makers who made their way to Giza on horseback in these pictures found in a house clearance.



They show a group of wealthy Irish men and women by the Pyramids during one of the first Thomas Cook package holidays.

Holiday snap: A group of Irish tourists pose in front of the Pyramids in one of the first Thomas Cook package tours

The groups are thought to be members of a 19th-century Irish Methodist community, who would have taken the escorted tour as they became fashionable at the end of the century.

The slide belongs to a collection found in a house in Dunmanway, Ireland, which also includes shots of tourists at Niagara Falls and in Jerusalem.



A series of Methodist ministers once lived in the house and it is thought the slides belonged to one of them.



Alongside the amatuer snaps, the fragile glass slides include a nmber of images bought from Victorian printers such as Newton & Co of Fleet Street.

Street Scene: A boy with a donkey and baskets in Victorian Ireland

They will be auctioned at Hegarty's auction house in Brandon, County Cork, on June 19 with a starting price of 1,500 euros.

Among the other images are scenes from 19th-century Ireland including a barefoot Kerry woman smoking a pipe and a boy with a donkey.



Experts say the slides would have been used as entertainment at gatherings of the minister's Methodist clergy.

The collection will go under the hammer at Hegarty’s sale room in Bandon, Co. Cork, at 4pm on Sunday.