Red Abbey
Tower

Walk down Douglas Street, turn into a quiet residential lane, and there it is between two trees, with a red door and a row of parked cars in front of it: a square stone tower seven hundred years old. Red Abbey Tower is the oldest building still standing in Cork. Most people who live within a hundred metres of it have never given it a second look, and it has outlasted every wall, gate and merchant's house that stood around it when it was new.

The tower is what is left of an Augustinian friary founded around 1300. The friars dedicated their church to St Augustine, but Cork people called it the Red Abbey for the colour of its sandstone, and the name won. What you are looking at is the crossing tower, the bit that stood over the middle of the church where the nave met the transepts. The nave, the cloister, the kitchens, the dormitories and the long body of the church have all gone. The tower held.

The siege of 1690

The tower had one afternoon of fame. In September 1690, during the war between King James and King William, the Earl of Marlborough brought an army to Cork and needed somewhere high to put his guns. The old friary stood just outside the city walls on the south side, and its tower gave him a clear look down on to the town. He used it as a lookout and a battery position, and his cannon opened a breach in the wall by what is now the Grand Parade. Cork surrendered within days.

The fighting and the fires that followed finished off what remained of the friary. By the 1700s the church was a ruin and its cut stone was being carted away to build other things, which is what happened to most of medieval Cork. The tower survived because it was solid, because it made a handy landmark, and because pulling it down was more trouble than it was worth.

A sugar refinery worked in the ruins for a while in the eighteenth century until it burned. Later the open ground around the tower became a small public space. Each generation found a new use for the site and left the old tower alone, which is how a medieval friary ends up sharing a lane with terraced houses, its worked stone still sharp against the sky.

Hidden in plain sight

Today the tower stands in a little open space among the houses, five minutes on foot from the South Parish and Elizabeth Fort. There is no grand approach, no ticket desk, and nothing to go inside. You stand at the foot of it and look up at stone that was already old when Columbus sailed. For a building this age to survive at all is rare. For it to survive unnoticed on an ordinary street, with washing on the lines next door, is about as Cork as it gets.

On the walk

We bring you to the foot of the tower and explain what you are looking at: the last piece of a medieval friary, the gun platform that helped break the city in 1690, and the oldest stone still standing in Cork. Then we show you the outline in the paving, and the whole church appears around you for a moment.