20 Blackrock Castle & Cobh
20.1 0. Recirculation
Coming to Cork City is giving me a pleasing sense of circularity as I began this episodic odyssey in Dublin City and will finish it here in its semi-sibling city, albeit wetter, mellower, waterier. The drive down is a nostalgic, visual recap of so many places I’ve been to along the southern coast: Waterford. Dungarvan. Youghal. Each trip seems so vivid in my head, first grinding my pedals, followed by a longslow, wordbearing, memory-making, mastication of experience. And yet whizzing by in my boola bogger has reminded me of so much I have forgotten. Deleted scenes. Unremembered bends on the road. A gloaming view of Dungarvan Bay. Along the westward-bound N25, the sun sets slowly in front of me and a crescent moon squares up beside it. I should stop for a snap but I’m too busy marvelling. It was sunlight that first drew me to lighthouses, an urge to grab the light and bathe in its glowry. And so shooting for the stars has taken me to the moonier parts of this craggy-edged island.
This time, for a change, I’ll be exploring the inland waters of Cork Harbour which is among a handful of harbours claiming to be the second largest in the world.1 It is a complex mix of rivers, islands and loughs. Several rivers feed into it and wrap around the islands, including one, shaped like a dog’s skull, which hosts the city centre of Cork. Another, Great Island, contains the Cove of Cork, nowadays Gaelicized as “Cobh”, but big enough to host The Titanic, back when we called it “Queenstown”. Great Island separates the large Upper Harbour from the enormous Lower Harbour, with its island prisons and toxic dumps and relatively narrow passage out to the Celtic Sea slash wild Atlantic Ocean. I may or may not have time and energy to explore places beyond Cobh, but I’m headed there to see its spidery lighthouse. En route I’ll stop off at the astronomical observatory in Blackrock Castle, a former lighthouse located where the wide River Lee meets the yuge Lough Mahon.
But most of all, I want to understand the watery complexity of Cork City and Environs, with its split river, endless bridges and impossibly steep streets. I’ve been to thecity centre a handful of times, on cricket tour as a teenager, drinking in my twenties, and a couple of later trips to get my eyes and brain tested for my light sensitivity condition. But I always seem to be crossing bridges and getting out of my geographic depth. Back in the Daniel Doris, before your Google Maps, I would just hit the boozers with my head down, or follow a local’s outstretched arm. The geography never got burnt into my brain, so today I’m going to treat myself to a bike tour of its riverscape.
20.1.0.1 Bed beds
I get in to the city at like half ten, park up outside St Patrick’s Church, and I’m booked in to a dorm room in Sheila’s Hostel, up the riverbank on the North side of the town. As soon as I get there I text my wife to confirm that the place isn’t a basically homeless shelter, cos you wouldn’t know these days. I’m half embarrassed to be in a Sonic Youth hostel at my age but I remember from my galavanting pisshead days that there were always a few oddball cyclists kipping in hostels, sober and older, in need of a cheap mattress and an early exit. I’m actually surprised to see how many people my age or older are floating about, between muinteoir types leading teenage groups, and the working homeless, taking shelter for a night or five. Otherwise, little has changed in the eleven years since I was last in one of these places, in Geneva, sharing a bunk bed with a Tanzanian diplomat. You’ve got your giddy reception staff. Your tiny unisex bathrooms. Your people planning out their trips of an evening. Your emotional guitarist. Luckily there’s no bar in this one as booze would ruin my kip. In my room, everyone’s conkers when I climb up the creaking ladder into my top bunk. The bed has a ledge welded onto it with a USB port, the first technological development of note since 2013, bar all the knobs on their Tonys. Wouldn’t it be so soothing if we could all just chillax and maintain such a glacial level of progress over the remaining few decades of my expected life? I wake up at half three having a nightmare about being squashed among dozens of people in a maybe gas chamber. The dorm room turns out to be windowless and thus airless. I get out of the Margaret, hit the Soviet, and notice that another room’s door is being wedged open with a bin. So I do the same for mine and pass out til half six when the loudest person in the world wakes me up, rolling a cigarette in the needlessly dark, on his bed, like a prisoner.
20.2 1. City Tours
0624, August 8, 2024.
Cork City is near empty at 7am, but Bus Stop Coffee on Patrick’s Quay is open and the owner is a good match for sprightly me. It’s a good thing cos there are no longer any bus stops outside and no one is on the street, let alone in the cafe. The Olympics are still on and he’s telling me all about the Pakistani fella who won the javelin there last night, one of just six athletes representing that country. My favourite story is of the Afghan sisters who fled their country before the Taliban came back into power and they were cycling in the Road Race on Sunday, even making the early breakaway. Lanterne Rouge reckons the younger one could make it in the pro peleton. We reminisce about watching the Barcelona Olympics as kids. Yer man had tonsillitis so the family’s TV was put into his bedroom – black and white, cos they were working class – and every evening he’d fill them in on the day’s events. Ours was black and white cos my mam and dad were just cantankerous. We end up swapping lockdown stories, with him being delighted just to get a long rest from aeons of coffee making, the sort of rest you don’t know you need until you get it. Meanwhile, I was hanging out beside Lake Tahoe in a half-price Airbnb atop a delicioso mountain. I had just begun a job in Silicon Valley, brought my dependents over on an eighteen-month J1 visa of all things, and had spent three days in the office before we were all told to Foxtror Oscar until further notice. Me and the fam sat it out for two months in miserable South Bay suburbia before hitting the peaks, and it’s the place my mam would most like to go back to after cycling 6000k across The United States. But after two months of lakeside beauty we panicked and moved home and I spent nearly four years working remotely without ever seeing my colleagues again.
20.2.1 Bell(e) views
Your man finally gets some customers and it’s time for me to boost. I’m parked on the smaller North side of the city, not far from the train station, so I need to ditch the jammer, preferably for free. My private barista couldn’t think of a handy spot with free all-day parking but I ask a streetcleaner for suggestions and he racks his brains for a bit – you can actually see his head wobble as he thinks about it – and then suggests I head for Ballyvolane Shopping Centre, up the hill. There are a couple of council estates along the way where I’d be safe enough he reckons but I decide that outside Dunnes is the easiest, cos I once parked for the day outside someone’s gaff in Ballyfermot and they double parked on top of me to learn me a lesson. So I drive up the steep hill out of town and park up beside Dunnes, knowing I’ll regret the climb later when I’m knackered. I whip out my old Falcon which is in flying form now, in case you’re asking. My shoulders are comfortable because I put on a shorter stem which I yoinked from the Mirage bike my mam cycled from Paris to Lourdes and back.
Up on the hill, I have the perfect vantage point for understanding the topography of the city centre. I’m cruising around, sniffing out views of the whole city and I see a residential road called Bellview Mews and with a name like that there has to some good views from nearby. I follow my nose, then a local’s directions, to a viewing point down the back of a grassy lane where you can stand on someone’s basically wall and look out over the whole city. It’s a good view of the buildings and the low marshscape upon which the city was built, but I can’t see or appreciate the complexity of its interlocking waters. I do at least get a giggle out of the spelling though. The little mews out the back have an Anglicised spelling but these larger, city-monitoring houses retain the French spelling of <Bellevue>, befitting the education of their erstwhile presumably owners.
I ask a postman where I can find a beller view and, a little shocked by my disappointment, he recruits a local who suggests the Montenotte Hotel. It’s a modern, fancy hotel, with a couple of women my age hanging out the back of it, drinking Bloody Marys for breakfast. But the views are blocked by big fluffy trees. All the same, I do love the way you can just snoop about a hotel’s grounds for entertainment, and, if push comes to shove, you can order a coffee or a pint and just hang out. One or two yooros extra for a dose of mild opulence. Or indeed free facilities. The Big Man, who didn’t hit a boozer til his early thirties, became an advocate of dropping a log in like The Westbury Hotel, while the rest of us naively contented ourselves with boozers like Bruxelles, an unlikely yet perennial hygiene leader in Dublin’s #GraftonDistrict.
I descend back to the river where I see my street cleaner buddy is now yapping to my barista buddy, the two of them being the early morning face of Cork City, and I miss the days when there were more public-facing professions. Street vendors screaming all day. Herald or Press. Get your lighters, five for 50.
I head westwards on a bike lane along the north quays towards the Mardyke, an area of beautiful mature green campuses, and home to the few strong memories I have of Cork. The north side of the river becomes too steep for anything but back gardens but the bike trail, as the lane magically becomes, crosses a skinny suspension bridge over the river. The land here was never built upon because it is prone to flooding and so it hosts various parks and sports grounds used mostly by students inhabiting the adjacent arboretum known nowadays as University College Cork and, in the Victorian era, as Queen’s College, Cork.2 The Mardyke dates from 1719 when its marshy islands were drained and landscaped by a Dutchman, Edward Webber, who named it after the Meerdyke promenade in Amsterdam.3
The Mardyke provides us with a clue of what Cork city landscape must have originally been like. Its name in Irish is Corcadh, meaning “marshlands”, and it is a low flat floodplain which ought to be free to soak up excess water from the River Lee. In 2009 the city’s inability to absorb excess river water was shown up as the entire area around the centre was completely flooded at enormous cost.
20.2.2 Memory slips
I nip to the cricket ground to reminisce over my time playing cricket there when I was like fifteen, with a seventeen-year-old Gary Black zipping it down. We had four slips against their petrified lower order, a real novelty for a wicketkeeper in soggy Ireland. But the best part was playing cards on the train down, the camaraderie among a gang of competitive kids happiest when fighting. It was the last cricket tour I ever went on and soon afterwards the arse fell out of the club’s junior teams, leaving me with a wodge of older teammates but no fellas my age nor birds to shift like they apparently had in Merrion.
Next, I stop off in Fitzgerald Park, with its beautiful space-age hangout shelters, and I listen in as an ageing hashhead, in the most melodic of Cork City accents, dishes out nuggets of philosophy to a young stoner, along with a few anecdotes from the archives. He recalls mitching from school and giving blowback to a gullible autistic lad who ended up pissing his pants. The story’s anachronistic nastiness isn’t what hits me. It’s the fact that the storyteller reminds me of myself, feeling the uncontrollable need to offload stories from his youth. Is it borne of a sense of adult failure and harking back to a time of personal glory?
20.2.3 Something to fall back on
I head over to admire the calm, manicured campus of UCC where ugly buildings have been hidden behind gorgeous trees, and the tree surgeons are hard at work before the students return. Part of me laments not working in a university. I always assumed it’d be some kind of fallback job to do if the writing didn’t work out. But the writing still hasn’t worked out and neither did life as a tertiary schoolteacher. I didn’t have the stomach, after my PhD, to suffer through years of travel and uncertainty while also bringing up a young child, so I taught English as a foreign language for a reliable pittance and, in the evenings, I studied to become a tech drone. Few workers are treated worse than early-career academics so you’ve gotta really want it, and have the chance to fail. I loved the research and a fair chunk of the collegiality but the job seemed to either attract dull people or suck the life out of those who had any, so the professors weren’t great role models. In Trinity at least. Edinburgh was a different story. Ish. Sometimes I’d travel abroad to conferences and everyone just wanted to spew out their findings instead of collaborating and synergistically pushing forward each others’ ideas. It got me down. Although I was permanently brassic as a postgrad and that does nothing for your mood either. The Germans would show up in a tin of fruit and cash enough to pay for the recommended hotel, while I’d be in a hostel dorm and show up in a t-shirt. It was nice to see that I had foreign colleagues who were treated with respect but you can’t be raising a family under those conditions., especially with Tashkent going through the Barrier Reef during the Onesies.
20.2.4 Lovely Irlen
Nonethenevertheless, I would have struggled to work in a university because I have trouble with sustained reading. It goes by different names – Irlen syndrome, scotopic sensitivity, visual stress – but bright lights are a pain, and so are complex patterns. Reading is basically complex patterns on a bright background, so it tires me out and makes me irritable and gives me headaches and nausea, although only professional reading contexts have ever pushed me that far. Like marking double-spaced essays for hours. In civilian life, I just stop reading after a few minutes and I lost years of intellectual growth before I discovered audiobooks. I remember years ago I was co-editing a massive book about English spelling which me and the late Vivian Cook had envisioned. I had a wad of essays to read, all printed out with double spacing so I could lay into them with my red pen or maybe toxic marker. I was hanging out in Anna Hamilton’s #BigHouse up in Enniskillen for the week. She was studying for her Masters in anthropology, so we had a nice skedj going, with long walks in the morning and a Samuel Beckett festival on in the evenings. So we’d read all day and then go watch Beckett being performed in some other language, with surtitles on the side. I have never had such headaches in my life and I had to leave after every performance. The constant eye movement from stage to side-screen was just too much for my already tired brain. I felt awful for Anna who was hosting me for the week and had such a great set up for us.
Soon after, I made an appeal for help on facebook and someone told me about coloured filters. I went and found an Irlen diagnostician in Cork, and I went down with my nowwife cos she reckoned she might have it too, and she does, albeit less severely. We stayed in Shandon Bells Guest house, right here at the entrance to UCC, and we both ended up with custom-tinted lenses. The idea is that sufferers are sensitive to specific frequencies of light, aka colours, so if you put those colours into a lens, and throw in whatever normal prescription you need on top, then the problem ought to go away or at least reduce. It seems to affect a lot of people with dyslexia, ADHD and/or autism. Delicate souls who struggle with the sensory overload of our world. For me, the lenses have been transformative, and my life is immeasurably better. The world sits still and my agitation is lower. I can stare at complex patterns for a long time, such as a tree with no leaves. I began to be able to write on-screen for an hour or two at a time, and later I learnt to code and could do it all day. I still can’t read like I used to, so I mostly just listen to audiobooks now, and I missed a decade of heavy reading as a result. Although coverage remains limited and if I was to stay working in tech, I’d very much like to make robot audiobooks, rather than boring-ass Siri which is no more than a butler spouting a few words. For example, I just dunzoed Dervla Murphy’s Full Tilt but couldn’t monster the rest of her oeuvre because none of it has been recorded, so it would be nice, albeit worrying for the future of the audio recording industry, to use an AI voice to read it to me.
I feellike a turning point in my light sensitivity condition was the effect of some serious concussions I got playing rugby in my early twenties, after which I never seemed to read as much as before. I remember getting kneed in the face in a ruck, came off, had a cheeky needless smoke on the sideline, came back on, and then after the game, someone dropped me off in James’s Hospital and left me there on my Tobler. I was waiting for several extra hours because I was off having a smoke during triage when I was called.
I defo had the condition as a kid cos I hated light in my eyes and always wanted the blind pulled down as the low evening sun came straight in to our kitchen. It’s just the severity that has been increased by the head traumas. All told, I reckon I’ve had between fifteen and twenty concussions in concussions in my life.
Depending on what you include, I’ve had between ten and twenty concussions in my life, between rugby and cricket and even heading a football. That was how I made the connection between concussion and reading. I headed a football the wrong way and the aching pain in my right eye was identical to the pains I was getting from sustained reading or bright lights. Even now, working on a computer still hurts a bit. My head hurts right now, writing this in a bright, white library, even with my dark blue wraparound lenses on, and I usually have to sit in low light so as to keep my concentration. I don’t know if it’ll ever be any different. I’m getting re-tested in a couple of weeks’ time so maybe the updated lenses will improve my reading and agitation.
20.2.5 Docks
I stall it through the city centre where people loiter near a glass cafe on the wide pavement and, with this much sunshine, I feellike I could be in Central Europe. I’ve no intention of watching people scampering around, looking to get to work or buy more shoes, so I push on pronto and head out along the south quays, where the two sides of the river join back up and there is a sense again of breathable spaciousness. Modern glass buildings are scattered among the derelict warehouses. There is a nice feeling here of Rip it up and Start Again, where the city can be rebuilt; a less tragic version of what happened to the cities bombed in World War II. I soon encounter the ad hoc Marina Market with a few dozen food stalls inside a converted market building and I decide to come back this evening to see what it’s like when people fill up its tables and, wouldyabelieve, couches for the public to lounge. The river widens slowly on the way out towards Lough Mahon and alongside it is the large, partially developed Marina Park screaming watch-this-space, as it’s only been open since 2022 and is ripe for new subsections. The area is dominated by Pairc Ui Chaoimh where Cork play GAA and Munster have started playing a few rugby matches, instead of the oversized Thomond Park in their undersized base town of Limerick, a hundred bogger minutes away. There’s space aplenty to cycle through the park until I come out onto Blackrock Road and into the eponymous mature suburb.
20.3 2. Blackrock Castle
The castle sits a little beyond Blackrock, not quite on the corner of the rectangular peninsula – think Turkey flipped in the mirror – but on the tiniest protrusion out of the river bank. This allows for views around the corner, making it an ideal spot for a lookout tower and as a lighthouse guiding ships from the lough into the river. It’s half ten now so I get a ticket for the tour at eleven, leave my phone to charge in the ticket office and stall over for a coffee in what turns out to be a restaurant in love with itself. The lady outside tells me I can’t wear my cycling shoes inside, which is fairenuffski, so I tell her I’ll just take them off. Now she has to go and ask the hashtag General Manager if he can allow me in, so I stand outside and seethe a while until she comes back, all smiles, and welcomes me in. Without asking my opinion, she sits me down on a godawful middle-of-the-room seat, like an island on a lake, and then hands me a well-laid out menu. But I’ve just nailed a mango and a half block of cheese, so I only order a scone and a Yorkshire Toffee, then I blast out a ton of notes, while Hozier mimics do their best to put me off.
I’m a smidge late for the tour but it turns out to be a disappointment as the guide, a Swedish postgrad at a guess, has run out of passion for the task and blasts through her spiel, then doesn’t even open the floor for questions. It’s like we paid in just to get access to the view from the top. Plus a chance to see a framed picture on the wall of a Cork flag in outer space. It turns out that everyone – in person, in print, on video and across the Jimi Internet – has the same spiel about the castle’s remarkable range of uses dating back to 1582. It has been a signalling station. A lighthouse. A defence fortification. A gun battery. A maritime court. A place for banquets. A restaurant. A rowing club. A burnt out wreck. A ruin. A brick shithouse. And now, in the most unlikely of outcomes, an observatory. Somehow, just a few clicks from a city centre, it is dark enough for astronomers to gaze at the stars and photocopy the white-on-black sky for later analysis. Downstairs, a video shows a passionate researcher explaining her work and how the telescopes are used. My interest is whetted enough to check out their YouTube channel about the Universe and I’d love to come back again by gatecrashing a more informative school tour which seems to be their real focus. No one seems to know anything about the lighthouse which has been inactive since 1903, although Lighthouse Pete notes that it was one of a series of such lights guiding ships in and out of the river. But it doesn’t appear to have had a Fresnel Lens or any of that hashtag good stuff. I’m just glad I got to see such a beautiful and unusual building, especially given how unromantic the next lighthouse is.
20.4 3. The Cove of Cork
The next phase of the trip involves a small bit of actual cycling. A greenway follows the coast all the way from Blackrock to Passage West where the ferry zips back and forth to Great Island, home to Cobh. It’s good to be moving but then I have to stall on for twenty minutes as I’ve just missed the ferry. The views across the passage are fantastic and I spot a row of multi-coloured houses on high which I’ll have to add to my planned photography collection: Council Houses with a view. As I get off the ferry, some Yanks ask me where the Titanic Experience is. I didn’t know there was one and I must say it’s not an experience I myself would like to have, although it sounds like Cobh is still cashing in. I see a bunch of scaldy-ass industrial stuff sticking up to our right slash south, and I tell them it has to be that way. I follow my own guesswork directions and slowly overtake a family of four cyclists, acting out my dream holiday, albeit laden down with camping gear. For some reason, they are making no effort to use each other’s draft and ease the burden, a reminder that families are often brutal at teamwork. Round the corner, in the actual water, and almost big enough to block my view of the entire harbour, sits a floating city, sidegridded with a thousand or more mini balconies, a handful of lifeboats, and a bunch of boat stuff on the roof. It’s a real-life Cruise Ship, which I’ve never seen this close up, and it looks like some kids got a squillion copies of the same Lego set and morphed it into a monster boat.
From my vantage point, I can see a procession of badly-oiled machines plod off the ship and march up to the town. Most of Cobh seems to converge at one junction, a vortex of slowmoving humans and vehicles flowing in from all sides. There is a depression in the cliffs, with the main street on the central passage coming from the north; a descent along the coast from both west and east, and up from the port to the south. I descend to this vortex to find that the locals have seen the tourists coming, and there’s a glut of boozers, restaurants and tat floggers sucking lifeblood cash from these proverbial fish out of actual water. While the tourists vary greatly by tongue and complexion, they are united by their gawking faces and the tiny gift bags they clutch. Light reflects evenly off their designer clothes which haven’t been, and may never go, through fifty-plus cycles in the Rogan Josh. I’m looking forward to asking them about their experiences, cooped up on that monster ship, but first I have to head East out of town to get closer to the lighthouse.
I head out of the town up the steep East Hill where there is a marginally better viewing point of the lighthouse, over 700m out at sea. There is little visible beauty in the two-tier structure, with its skinny, arachnid legs crouching in the sea and a dumpy lighthouse light atop its raised, octagonal floor. The beauty is in the security of the corkscrew design, designed, astonishingly, by a blind engineer from Belfast called Alexander Mitchell, whose screw pile design was used in 150 North American lighthouses and several more in Britain and Ireland, including the one I forgot about in Dundalk Bay, and one in Moville, Co Donegal which I am yet to see. Those two have space enough for a lighthouse keeper but the one here in Cobh does not, so the keeper would nip back and forth on the relatively calm waters of the harbour.5 The screw pile design is basically a corkscrew shape, driven into the sand bank below, preventing the structure from shifting with the sands.
The expanse of Cork’s lower harbour, shaped like a conical flask, or perhaps an large ankle boot, is perfectly visible from this vantage point, and there are many locals who wake up daily to this extraordinary view, although it must seldom be this clear and calm. In the distance is a relatively narrow strait out to the ocean. The headland on the left (east) is home to Roche’s Point lighthouse but it is not visible form here. The Aghada power station is clearly visible though, with its red & white hooped tower looking well at this distance. The ‘base of the flask’ or ‘sole of the boot’ is the southern edge of rectangular Great Island, along which Cobh sits. The view of the west side (right) is dominated by two nearby islands, Haulbowline and Spike, both with curious histories, and these obscure the more complex peninsulas behind them. Ringaskiddy, where Cork’s passenger ferries dock, and Crosshaven on the strait. I’d like to see it today but probably won’t have time. Haulbowline Island used to have a steel plant and so much toxic waste was dumped off the side of the island that it has grown from sixty to eighty acres in size. That space is now a young park, but some have blamed it for Cobh having by far the highest rates of cancer in Ireland.6 Spike Island had a fort built on it in the Napoleonic era but it was converted into a prison during to famine to house the growing number of convicts who could thence be deported to Australia or Bermuda. Mad as that might sound nowadays, the Lickety Splits were recently looking to deport their growing number of pesky refugees to Rwanda. The prison was the largest in the world and housed over 2000 inmates at times. The island became a military base again in 1883, but a big prison during the War of Independence. After the Free State was established, the island remained under British control until 1938, as one of three deep water Treaty Ports, along with Berehaven in Bantry Bay and Lough Swilly in Donegal. With all this history, and more, the island has more recently become a tourist destination, dubbed Ireland’s Alcatraz and it was considered Europe’s best tourist destination in 2017.7
I do a quick loop around the rest of the town, which on the periphery looks like every other town in Ireland, albeit not so sprawling, and I then descend back down to St Colman’s Cathedral, to which the cruise ship tourists have ascended. In a little park across the road, a gang of uninterested harpists pluck notes for the polite, uninspired tourists who really need to be sent on a few laps of the town to get the blood moving. I’m reminded of my days as a tour guide in the Vatican, herding them about and pointing to outstanding acts of beauty. The cathedral, in it high narrowness, reminds me of John’s Lane Church on Thomas St in Dublin, and I sit down to chillax and write my notes, but I realise how thirsty I am, and how much of a thirst I have on me, so I roll back down the hill and, back in the vortical town centre. I grab a quick snap of the statue of Sonia then I nip in to Kelly’s pub for a Brit Award and a break from the sun.
20.4.1 Kelly’s
I might as a well be in Temple Bar, although the tourists are here for such a short time that many of them don’t even know they are supposed to be drinking Guinness. Or Murphy’s. Or Beamish. Or whatever you are supposed to drink in Cork. Down the back is a posse of Ozzies with stompingly strong accents and I listen in while taking a video of a map on the wall. It shows the south-west of Ireland’s coast with all of the lighthouses flashing in what I assume is their distinctive pattern. On another wall is a map of Cork Harbour and its flashing lights. I set up camp back at the bar, with a fresh Moretti and a Dalston Dinner. That’s a bag of salted peanuts tossed over a bag of salt’n’vinegar crisps, described by Nike Segnit, who is perhaps the second best writer of paragraphs in English, after Jimbo Jokes. I scribble away like an angsty teen, except I’m giggling and gesticulating away as I work out my words. Somehow, I don’t get talking to any of the cruise ship people. My first vickies are the cyclists I passed out on my way here. They’re not up for much chat, in English or French, but it turns out they’ve cycled from Rosslare and they kipped in Clonvilla campsite last night where they had their first shower in four days. I just hope they took the coast road and popped in for a few #SeaSwims along the way.
20.4.2 Fisherman Sean O’Neill from Cardigan
Eventually, a sunbattered, workmuscled young man sits down and orders a pint and a whiskey chaser. He turns out to be a real-life fisherman, fresh from his day on the water. He’s as gabby as they come and delighted to tell me every detail of his life, unlike the solitudinous types who are really out fishing for silence. I can’t quite place his Southern British accent but I’m not going to interrupt his #flow. He goes out at 3am every morning and is finished by lunchtime, delighted to have the day to himself after. They leave bait and boxes in certain locations and it’s a constant puzzle to work out where the fish are. It’s a science, really. It’s just him and the boat and its owner, and he’s chuffed to have finally found someone he gets on with as he’s his own man, and he’s been worked to the bone. He shows me the hack of his hands and tells me of the brutality some employers have put him through. Twenty-hour shifts on repeat out at sea. He’s only twenty-eight but already he’s a wreck. He’s been in Cobh for nearly a year and wants to stay. Feels at home here. He’s worked all over England and Wales but he’s from Cardigan, which is much like Ireland, and his grandfather was an O’Neill from County Antrim. He’s proud of himself for getting out of his home town, unlike everyone he grew up with. He’s wanted to be a fisherman since he was a teenager and he just went and did it, and I’m both delighted for him and inspired because all I want to be is a writer and I need to focus on that a hundy pee. I won’t be getting another life. He shows me some gorgeous snaps he’s taken from the boat and he wants to start flogging prints to the tourists. The sky. The water. The cruise ships. Printing them on canvas is the way to go, he reckons, cos the cruise ship tourists have their luggage weighed. That explains the tiny bags. I’m curious to know the cost of production too as I’m thinking of doing something with my own photos, although I’m worried the image quality won’t scale up. But to begin, I could print off photos of Wicklow Lighthouse for the wall in my guest room. I wish him well and ask if I should head out to Crosshaven next or do a lap of the island. He tells me to do the latter as he did it in his sea kayak recently and says it’ll look great in the sunshine. A couple of lads outside tell me to do the same, so I get back on my Paul van and hit the proverbial.
20.5 4. Return Leg
20.5.1 Lap of Great Island
The inland waters that surround Great Island turn out to be a let down after the spectacular views across the Lower Harbour, perhaps because the tide is out and the terrain is sludgy. It’s a 20k loop around the island and the best spot I find is East Ferry Marina, which may or may not be known as the Marlogue. The entrance to the jetty is blocked by an ugly gridded gate and I get a Brendan Butchers from a smug couple heading out to their boat who are highly suspicious of my unexpected presence. A notice from the Customs Drugs Watch makes an appeal to anyone who has ‘seen or heard anything suspicious’ and I’m half wondering if I should get ahead of the narrative and report the smarmy pair before they report me as a potential bike courier.
I head back along the quiet northern edge of the island where the tide is now out, increasing my disappointment, and eventually I come across a low humpback bridge at the narrow point between Great Island and Fota Island. Standing proudly nearby is Belvelly Castle, an old watchtower which has been beautifully restored by an Antrim developer called Garry Wilson who one day wants to restore a lighthouse. My brain is too full now to be checking out the recreation-heavy Fota Island, with its zoo and resort and golf course, so I peg it back to the ferry port where the driver, if that’s what they’re even called, stalls the ball for me, and minutes later I’m back in Passage West. The #greenway into Cork City is a lot busier at this hour, mostly with commuters coming against me, and it’s a bit shorter on the diagonal with Blackrock Castle cut out. This is quality urban green space and I look forward to seeing its grayth gaying forrd.
20.5.2 Marina Market
I rock up to the Marina Market where the food choices are legion, and I lounge on a couch with a Dekker Curry while wedged between two different dining groups. The family to my right have made the mistake of ordering from like five different places so the dad is up and down and everyone’s food comes at different times. It’s the sort of detail that people will need to learn about as more of these public eateries emerge. The teenage girls on my left are just lounging, maximising the use of their shared bubble tea. It’s great to see a proper public space for people, with both a roof and fresh air. The place emerged during Covid as a semi-openair #safespace for a few vendors to flog scran and coffee, and it has grown and formalized since, although much of it remains made of wood. Despite battles over its legitimacy, much of it to do with the presence of a chemical plant next door, the council granted it five more years of trading, starting in late 2023, and long may it last. It’s a great example of bottom-up development and a welcome reprieve from the sterile dross that populates the stupidly expensive mixed-use developments, where the price of trade is too high for all but the most established chain stores, meaning that the next-generation living they promote has more in common with an airport than a close-knit community. There’s plenty of that in the pipeline. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have affordable eateries in our society, with space for punters to hashtag chill and mingle. Clearly they need to be rooved in Ireland, with our famous fresh air blowing through, and the Marina Market is doing all of this. It’d just be nice if they could move on from the permasesh music and maybe branch out to some, like, early Fleetwood Mac?
It’s 5k back to the car via the tail end of rush hour but my legs are still warm enough to piss up the hill and give out to a bus driver who could do with some patience training from Dublin Bus. Maybe I could do with some myself. I’m in the car before 7 to watch Rhasidat Adeleke coming fourth in the Olympic 400m, and it reminds me of a young Sonia being passed out on the inside in Barcelona. RTE do their level best to look for positives, even interviewing her a second time, but they just need to let the girl have her sadness. People say there’ll be plenty more chances but life doesn’t always work like that so you gotta take them when they come.
I piss it home on the fuel-inefficient route along the motorway but I’m way too Alan Shattered to drive across the Wicklow Mountains in the Dietmar dark. I’m delira and excira to have finished off this phase of the odyssey no one asked me to do, because the way the world is going, there could be a nuclear winter before I manage to cycle to the other seventy lighthouses on and around the telegenic island of Ireland.
Port Jackson in Sydney is the largest natural harbour and those vying for second place are Halifax Harbour in Canada, Trincomalee Harbour in Sri Lanka and Pool Harbour in England.↩︎
UCC is thus spomething of a companion institution to Queen’s University in Belfast and also to the Queen’s University, Galway, renamed as University College Galway.↩︎
https://web.archive.org/web/20090731054957/http://corkheritage.ie/?page_id=908↩︎
Photo taken from Echo Live https://www.echolive.ie/corknews/arid-40137734.html↩︎
https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/building-of-the-month/spitbank-lighthouse-cork-harbour-county-cork/↩︎
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/town-in-shadow-of-toxic-dump-has-40pc-higher-cancer-rate/26803481.html↩︎
Spike Island’s lofty award might be taken with a pinch of salt. At one point in the late noughties, my mate Rossa Minogue claimed to be the number one attraction in Rome. The tour-guide company he worked for was getting rave reviews on TripAdvisor, bumping their tours above the actual attractions such as The Colosseum and Vatican Museums. And, seeing as Rossa did most of the company’s tours, he understandably took the bulk of the kudos, although the owner took the bulk of the Johnny Cash.↩︎