Kinsale

Half an hour south of the city, where the Bandon river opens into the sea, sits the prettiest harbour town in Cork and one of the most fought-over patches of ground in Ireland. Kinsale was a medieval wine port, the stage for the battle that finished Gaelic Ireland, and the site of the great star fort that watched the harbour mouth for two and a half centuries. These days it feeds you very well. It took a long time to get that peaceful.

The port before the fort

Kinsale grew rich early. Its deep, sheltered harbour was a natural landfall for ships working between Ireland, France and Spain, and for centuries the town sent fish and hides out and brought wine home. The same geography made it a target. Whoever held Kinsale held a door into Ireland, which is why a Spanish army chose to land here in 1601, and why the most decisive battle in Irish history was fought in the fields outside the town that Christmas Eve. We tell that story on its own page. The short version is that Gaelic Ireland lost, and the lords who lost it sailed away from this coast for good.

The star fort

The Crown did not forget the lesson. Between 1677 and 1682 it built Charles Fort on the eastern shore of the harbour, a huge star-shaped fortress designed by William Robinson, the man behind the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham in Dublin. The star was not for show. Angled bastions let the defenders cover every wall from the one beside it and left no flat face for cannon to batter. It is one of the biggest forts in Ireland, and it was tested within a decade. In October 1690, a fortnight after taking Cork, John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, marched down here and took it from its Jacobite garrison after a thirteen-day siege. Its one weakness was the hill behind it, and every attacker who ever looked at it noticed.

Stories off the Old Head

The British Army kept a garrison in Charles Fort right up to 1922, and the harbour kept making stories in between. In 1703 a Scottish sailor called Alexander Selkirk sailed out of Kinsale as sailing master on a privateer. A year later he fell out with his captain, asked to be put ashore on an empty island in the Pacific, and spent four years and four months alone on it before a ship found him. Daniel Defoe heard the story and wrote Robinson Crusoe. In 1915 the Lusitania went down eleven miles off the Old Head, just west of the town, and the fishing boats of Kinsale went out to pull survivors from the water. The inquest into the sinking was held in the courthouse here, and the Old Head has a museum and memorial garden to the dead.

Gunpowder to good food

Modern Kinsale traded its gunpowder for dinner. The narrow streets that once provisioned fleets now hold galleries, sailing boats and the restaurants that earned it the name of Ireland's gourmet capital, and the whole place is painted in colours you would not get away with in the city. The fort still stands over the harbour mouth, roofless and enormous, its bastions open to the sky and the sea wind. Give it an afternoon, walk the ramparts, then come back into town and eat.

On the walk

At Elizabeth Fort we tell the story of star forts and why the Crown built them over rebel harbours. Charles Fort is the full-size version, half an hour down the road, and we will tell you the best way to get there.