Best Places To Visit In Cork City IRELAND
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| Best Places To Visit In Cork City IRELAND |
It’s a funny place, Cork City, the place is buzzing with pubs, restaurants, music and that greatest of all hard-to-define words, ‘culture’; all the trappings of being a huge international metropolis, but no, it’s just really a very large town acting the cod at being a city.
For its modest size it has a stonking big opera house, a brand new music conservatory, a thriving Victorian university, a permanent national art gallery, an international airport, a zoo and many, many festivals and micro-festivals. And Murphy’s stout, of course.
The Road Network
The approach road in from Dublin is pretty average; after the motorway ends it’s a urban semi-industrial sprawl. Arriving from Limerick isn’t a whole let better and at best is confusing, with the western and southern approaches being the pick, though I must add that if you’re arriving from the south, it’ll be from the airport, otherwise you must have arrived from the Roscoff ferry or less glamorously, off a fishing boat.Kent Station
Kent Station, like a lot of places in Cork, is named after someone in the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, in this case, Thomas Kent. There’re five platforms but not a lot of trains though there’s an hourly service to Dublin, a dozen or so in the general direction of Kerry and a regular commuter run to a few outlying towns and suburbs.As you probably know, it’s impossible to phone any station directly now in almost any country so instead go to their website www.irishrail.ie
Cork Airport
In my humble opinion, Cork Airport is one of Ireland’s success stories, that and the fact that the country is waking up the realisation that it’s a major player in the agri-food industry. Well maybe Irish rugby too, I never thought I’d see the day when we could support four, hugely successful, professional teams.Back to the airport; in what seems the blink of an eye, it has gone from half-a-dozen hardy souls queuing beside a Shorts 360 to over 2,000,000 passengers per annum. The masterplan, according to the airport, is not world domination, as the term suggests, but trebling of its size. I wish somebody would have just had the foresight not to build the airport on a fog-bound hill with its own micro-climate; flying into Cork on a day anything but perfect is not for the faint-hearted.
It’s a 20 minute bus journey from Cork City’s Parnell Place Bus Station to the airport, (route 226) and Cork airport’s website address is mercifully easy to guess if you suffer from url-blindness, www.corkairport.com .
In town
In theory, Cork should be easy to navigate on foot and mostly it is fine, but there are a few pitfalls. Firstly, the entrances and exits of the huge indoor market that dominate a large chunk of the city centre, all kind of look the same, or at least they do to me; I’m forever ending up on a completely different street to where I thought I’d be. Secondly, there are lots of bridges and in many ways, it’s very bit of a mini-Venice without the pong of the canals. No, that’s inaccurate, it’s nothing like Venice, or Amsterdam so forget that; it’s just got lots of bridges.There’s a pretty good map here which is useful if you have a decent supply of colour ink in your printer. Alternatively try Orange Smile’s map which is a bit easier on the printer and works fine in mono as well. Or you could just go to the tourist office.
No, not a flat-pack tardis, just a random door somewhere in Cork.
St Patrick’s Street
The main drag in Cork is St Patrick’s St, a long sweeping boulevard with pedestrianised sections, lofty street lights with vertical banners advertising the latest reasons to love Cork and all the main big high street names screaming out at you. It’s a hive of activity and easily the best Main Street in any Irish city; Dublin’s O’Connell Street is a cross between a bad-tempered traffic queue and a place for groups of foreign language students to get lost, and Belfast’s Royal Avenue just doesn’t have the retail interest to generate a buzz; it’s all moved east by a few hundred yards to the splendid Victoria Square. Redeveloped in 2004, Patrick St seemingly has won many gongs for been Ireland’s best shopping street with some of the main players being Debenhams, Brown Thomas and believe it or not, it is the home to the first ever Dunnes Stores. Well, it had to be somewhere, I suppose. It’s a lovely place to pass the time of day and there are often many street entertainers and the like.Oliver Plunkett Street
Lying parallel to at least part of Patrick St is Oliver Plunkett St, a much cosier street with many more local shops, bars and coffee houses. It’s partially pedestrianised with just a narrow channel for cars and runs pretty much in a straight line from Custom House St to Grand Parade. Its main claim to fame is that it has the city’s Post Office, a branch of Penney’s and a Newbridge Silver outlet but that isn’t meant to sound unkind, there’s a crowded shopping experience the length and breadth of the streetYou’ll be amazed to find that Plunkett wasn’t involved in the 1916 Rising but he was the last victim of the Popish Plot around 300 years earlier. After being ordained a priest around the time the English banned Catholicism in Ireland, Plunkett went to Rome before returning as Archbishop of Armagh when the things calmed down a bit. When The Test Act in 1973 came about, Plunkett refused to subscribe for doctrinal reasons and basically continued to be thorn in the English aristocracy’s flesh. Eventually a price was put on his head and after hiding in a church near Drogheda, he was captured, tried and beheaded for treason, for ‘promoting Roman faith’; in fact he was the last Roman Catholic martyr to die in England. He’s a very interesting character and you’ll find hundred of churches, schools, playing fields and of course streets named after him, especially in Meath, where he was born and in Drogheda, where his major shrine is.
Cook St, as seen from Oliver Plunkett St
Grand Parade
A nice place to watch the world go by if there was enough seating but in any case this great swathe of a street runs from South Mall to St Patrick St. It has Cork’s main library on it and a small park just off it, but not much else. Believe it or not this street used to be one of the channels of the River Lee, right up until almost 1700. On the junction with South Mall, there’s Cork’s National Monument, but before that there was a statue of King George II on his fine filly; that’s long gone.South Mall
The final big street in Cork City is South Mall. It’s pretty nice, very Georgian but not much to do here other than taking your own life by reversing onto the road due to the angled, perpendicular parking. I’m sure there’s a better way of explaining this but right now I can’t think of it. This street was my first introduction to Cork City, many years ago when I went to see Rigoletto in Cork Opera House and stayed in The Imperial Hotel, a brute of a drive from Belfast 25 odd years ago when the roads west of Dublin were designed to keep you in Ireland’s capital. A good show, nonetheless.Other Streets
The main attractions of Cork City though are not so much those four main thoroughfares, it’s the myriad of very interesting side streets. Depending on how much time you have, initially stick to the rough square formed by Grand Parade (west) St Patrick’s St (north), South Mall (South) and Parnell Place (east). Get lost in these little avenues and alleyways, you’ll have a much better time than staring inanely at the brightly coloured displays of the big chain stores or heaven forbid, going to the city centre shopping centre at Merchant’s Quay.The English Market
Famed by Her Majesty when she visited Cork to speak Irish, The English Market is for me, one of the main reasons to not only go to Cork but to go south of County Dublin. It’s magnificent, all a modern farmers’ market should be. You name them, they’ve been there from Holywood ‘A’ listers, celebrity chefs and of course Her Majesty ‘herself’, as I’ve heard them call her here. Allow time to sit upstairs and eat at the restaurants, the first time I went I whizzed through it, bought loads but realised I’d kind of missed the point. Like a lot of places in life, it asks you to look and linger before revealing more to you, in its own time.Cork Opera House
A huge 1000 seater theatre, bang in the middle of the city, with a smaller ‘space’ behind it. It’s been tarted up about 12 years ago and has some nice cafes and the like in the large piazza-like area in front of it. Nothing like it in Belfast or Dublin and a lovely place to hang out when you’ve eaten yourself silly in the English Market. Don’t forget to have a wee dander around the quays behind it; in fact it’s a lovely walk westwards before crossing the River Lee beside the Mercy Hospital (what a name) and heading back eastwards. Of course this gives you a chance to drop into the Francisan Well Brewery and Pub before continuing along the modestly named Pope’s Quay and then making your way back to where you started; give or take a street, bridge or perhaps city.St Fin Barre’s Cathedral
This is worth going to see, but not if you have to drive because if you don’t get lost, you’ll not get parked. I have yet to successfully navigate the narrow streets to get there and get a parking space, on the same journey. If you’re used to English cathedrals, this will seem at best, like a large parish church, but they’ve done their best to make the most of it and it’s certainly interesting. Try to visit when the choir is in residence, again, despite its size and small Anglican Community within a largely Roman Catholic community, they have a fabulous choir and super music staff.University College Cork
Well worth a visit, it’s a lovely building and sprawls up to the River Lee, with a beautiful ‘quad’ and some lovely buildings dotted around the large campus.The ‘Quad’ in University College, Cork
There’s been an exhibition of Ogham stones there for the last while and if it’s still on when you’re going, then it’s certainly worth a visit. Ogham was an early medieval alphabet used mainly to write early Irish. There are approximately 400 or so left, date from around the time of St Patrick and are mostly in Counties Kerry and Cork, though there’s a stonking great big one in a field in the middle of Tyrone. It’s free to visit the one outside Omagh and as I discovered, you have the added buzz of the threat of being attacked by frisky cattle.
