Elizabeth Fort

Turn off Barrack Street, climb the short hill, and you walk into a set of walls laid out like a star. Elizabeth Fort has sat over the south side of Cork for four hundred years. In that time it has been a garrison, a prison for women waiting to be shipped to Australia, a police station, and now a place where you can walk the walls for nothing. Every one of those lives left something behind on the same stone.

The first fort here was a rush job. In 1601, in the nervous months around the Battle of Kinsale, English forces threw up an earth and timber fort on the high ground to keep an eye on a city they did not trust. When Queen Elizabeth died two years later, the citizens of Cork marched up the hill and pulled it down. The Crown made them rebuild it at their own expense, and in the 1620s it went up again in stone, in the low, angled, bastioned shape you see now. Look at the walls and you can read the design. Cannon had made tall walls useless, so these are thick and pointed, built to shrug off shot and to let the defenders fire along every face.

Garrison, prison, station

The fort saw one real fight. In September 1690, during the Williamite war, the Duke of Marlborough landed an army below the city and put his guns on the high ground on both sides of the river. Elizabeth Fort fell within days, and its captured cannon were turned round and fired on the walled town below. Cork surrendered inside a week.

After that the fort settled into a long working life as a barracks, with soldiers watching the city and the road to the harbour. In the 1830s it took on a darker job. It became a depot for women convicts, who were held here before the ships took them to Australia. For many of them, the gate you walk through was the last piece of Cork they ever saw. When the British left in 1922 the new state handed the fort to the Gardaí, and it served as a police station until 2013.

Through all of it, the walls stayed put. Barracks became cells, cells became offices, and the parade ground filled and emptied with soldiers, prisoners and guards in turn. The streets below changed with it. Barrack Street housed the soldiers, the suppliers and the families who lived off the garrison for two centuries, and when the troops went, the trade went too. The south side has kept that quieter character ever since.

The best free view in Cork

Since the Gardaí moved out, the city has opened the walls to anyone who wants to climb them, and it costs nothing. The reason to come is the walk round the ramparts. From the top you get the whole south side in one sweep: the roofs falling away to the river, the three spires of St Fin Barre's Cathedral almost close enough to touch, Shandon and the North Cathedral on the far ridge. Bring a coat. On a clear day it is the best view in Cork, and nobody is charging for it.

On the walk

We climb to the fort and walk the ramparts. We show you why the walls are shaped the way they are, tell you about the week in 1690 when the guns up here pointed at the city, run through the soldiers, prisoners and Gardaí who passed through the gate, and then stop at the rail so you can pick out everywhere you have walked that morning.