Cobh

A steep little town sits down the harbour from Cork city, and it has watched more Irish goodbyes than anywhere on earth. Between 1848 and 1950, some six million people emigrated from Ireland, and over 2.5 million of them sailed from this one port. If your family left Ireland, there is a fair chance this waterfront was the last of it they saw. The town has carried three names, and the three together tell Ireland's whole 19th and 20th century in miniature.

Cove, Queenstown, Cobh

The town began as Cove, plain English for what it was: the cove of Cork. In 1849 Queen Victoria stepped ashore here on her first visit to Ireland, a country still in famine, and the town took the name Queenstown in her honour. The name held for 71 years, through the great age of the transatlantic liners. Then, on 2 July 1920, in the middle of the War of Independence, the local council voted the Queen's name off the map and took back the old one in Irish spelling: Cobh, still pronounced "Cove".

The port of the goodbyes

Famine emigration made Queenstown the busiest emigrant port in Ireland, and the liners kept it busy for a century. Annie Moore boarded here in 1891 and became the first person processed through Ellis Island. The Titanic made this her final port of call in April 1912. In May 1915 the Lusitania went down off Kinsale, and Queenstown turned to rescue and mourning. The boats landed the survivors on this waterfront, and the dead lie in the Old Church Cemetery just north of town.

The spire and the Deck of Cards

St Colman's Cathedral stands above it all, begun in 1868 and finished in 1919. You can see its granite spire the length of the harbour, and it was among the last things generations of emigrants saw from the deck. Below it, the row of bright terraced houses known as the Deck of Cards leans down the hill toward the water, the view that ends up on more postcards than any other in the county. Today the liners come the other way. Cobh is Ireland's busiest cruise port, and the passengers walk ashore instead of away.

On the walk

We tell the Famine and the emigration story through the city tour, from the quays where the harbour boats loaded to the streets the leavers walked first. Cobh is the far end of that story. The train from Kent Station takes 25 minutes, along the water the whole way.