Cobh

A steep little town sits down the harbour from the city, and it has watched more Irish goodbyes than anywhere on earth. Between 1848 and 1950 some six million people left Ireland, and more than two and a half million of them sailed from this one waterfront. If your family left, there is a fair chance this was the last of the country they saw: the cathedral spire, the coloured houses, the tenders pulling out to the liner in the roads. The town has carried three names in two centuries, and the three together tell the whole story.

Cove, Queenstown, Cobh

It began as Cove, plain English for what it was, the cove of Cork. In August 1849 Queen Victoria stepped ashore here on her first visit to Ireland, a country still deep in famine, and the town took the name Queenstown in her honour. The name held for seventy-one years, right through the great age of the transatlantic liners. Then on 2 July 1920, in the middle of the War of Independence, the town council voted the Queen's name off the map and took the old one back in Irish spelling. Cobh, still said "Cove". You can read the mood of the country off a railway sign.

The port of the goodbyes

The Famine made Queenstown the busiest emigrant port in Ireland and the liners kept it busy for a century afterwards. The big ships anchored out in the harbour and the passengers went out to them in tenders from the quay, which meant the goodbye happened here, on the stones, with the families left standing on the pier as the boat pulled off. Annie Moore left from here in December 1891 and became the first person through Ellis Island. The Titanic anchored off the town on 11 April 1912 and took on her last 123 passengers. Three years later, in May 1915, the Lusitania went down off Kinsale and Queenstown turned into a rescue station and then a morgue. The boats landed the survivors on this waterfront, and the dead lie in three mass graves in the Old Church Cemetery just north of the town.

The spire and the Deck of Cards

St Colman's Cathedral stands over all of it. It was begun in 1868 and not finished until 1919, fifty-one years and several fortunes later, and its spire is the tallest thing on the harbour. Generations of emigrants watched it shrink from the stern of a ship. It holds a carillon of forty-nine bells, the biggest in Ireland, and on a still day you can hear it across the water. Below it the row of bright terraced houses called the Deck of Cards leans down the hill toward the sea, propped on each other like a hand about to fall, the view that ends up on more postcards than anything else in the county.

The liners come back

Today the big ships come the other way. Cobh has Ireland's only dedicated cruise berth, right on the waterfront where the tenders used to load, and the passengers walk ashore instead of away. Down on Casement Square the Lusitania memorial shows an angel over two exhausted fishermen, for the local boats that went out to the wreck. The old White Star Line office on the quay is the Titanic Experience now, and the Heritage Centre in the railway station tells the emigrant story with the ship manifests to hand, so you can look up your own people. Bring a name and a rough year. Someone in the family probably came through here.

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 twenty-five minutes, along the water the whole way.