Kinsale

Twenty-five kilometres south of the city, where the Bandon river meets 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 ended Gaelic Ireland, and the site of the great star fort that watched the harbour for two and a half centuries.

The port before the fort

Kinsale grew rich early. Its deep, sheltered harbour made it a natural landfall for ships working between Ireland, France and Spain, and for centuries the town traded fish and hides outward and wine home. That same geography made it a target. Whoever held Kinsale held a door into Ireland, which is why a Spanish army chose it in 1601, and why the most decisive battle in Irish history was fought outside it that Christmas Eve. We tell that story on its own page; the short version is that Gaelic Ireland lost.

The star fort

The Crown never forgot the lesson. Between 1677 and 1682 it built Charles Fort on the eastern shore of the harbour, a vast star-shaped fortress designed by William Robinson, the architect of Dublin's Royal Hospital Kilmainham. The star shape was function, not decoration: angled bastions gave the defenders interlocking fields of fire and left no flat wall for cannon to batter. It is one of the largest forts in Ireland, and it saw action within a decade. In 1690, after the Siege of Cork, a Williamite army under John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, took it from its Jacobite garrison after thirteen days.

The British Army garrisoned Charles Fort right up to 1922. And the harbour kept making stories between the wars: in 1703 the sailor Alexander Selkirk sailed out of Kinsale on the voyage that would strand him on a Pacific island for four years and inspire Robinson Crusoe, and in 1915 the Lusitania went down off the Old Head, just west of the town.

Modern Kinsale traded gunpowder for good food. The narrow streets that once provisioned fleets now hold galleries, sailing boats and the restaurants that earned it a reputation as Ireland's gourmet capital. The fort still stands over the harbour mouth, roofless and enormous, one of the finest places in Ireland to spend an afternoon.

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.