Cobh

Down the harbour from the city sits a steep little town that has carried three names and 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.

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 was renamed Queenstown in her honour. It stayed Queenstown 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 town's three names tell Ireland's whole 19th and 20th century in miniature.

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, and in May 1915 the town became a place of rescue and mourning when the Lusitania went down off Kinsale; the survivors were landed here and the dead buried in the Old Church Cemetery just north of town. Each of those stories has its own page.

Above it all stands St Colman's Cathedral, begun in 1868 and finished in 1919, its granite spire visible the length of the harbour. 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, one of the most photographed streets in Ireland. 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

The Famine and the emigration story run through the city tour, from the quays where the harbour boats loaded to the streets the leavers walked first. Cobh is 25 minutes from Kent Station by train, along the water the whole way.