Red Abbey
Tower

On a quiet residential street on the south side of the city, hemmed in by houses and parked cars, stands a square stone tower seven centuries old. Red Abbey Tower is the oldest building still standing in Cork, and most people walk past it without a glance. It has outlasted every wall, gate and grand house that stood around it when it was new.

The tower is all that remains of an Augustinian friary founded around 1300. The friars dedicated their church to St Augustine, but Cork called it the Red Abbey for the colour of the sandstone, and the name stuck. What you see is the central tower that rose over the crossing of the church, where the nave met the transepts. The rest of the friary, the cloister, the living quarters and the long body of the church, is gone. The tower held.

The siege of 1690

The tower's most dramatic day came in September 1690. During the Williamite war, an army under the Earl of Marlborough laid siege to Cork, which was held for King James. The attackers needed high ground to fire down on the medieval city walls, and the abbey tower gave it to them. They hauled cannon up into the old friary and used it as a gun platform, battering a breach in the walls near the present-day Grand Parade. The city fell within days.

The fighting and the fires that followed gutted what was left of the friary. By the eighteenth century the church was a ruin and the stone was being carried off for other buildings, the common fate of medieval Cork. The tower survived because it was solid, useful as a landmark, and too much trouble to pull down.

For a time a sugar refinery worked in the ruins around it, and later still the open ground became a small public space. Each generation found a new use for the site and left the tower alone. That is how a medieval friary ends up sharing a street with terraced houses and a children's playground, its worked stone still sharp against the sky.

Hidden in plain sight

Today the tower sits in a small open space among terraced houses, a five-minute walk from the South Parish and Elizabeth Fort. There is no grand approach and no entry fee, because there is nothing to enter. You stand at the foot of it and look up at worked stone that was already old when Columbus sailed. For a building this old to survive at all is rare. For it to survive unnoticed, on an ordinary street, is what makes it so Cork.

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 broke the city in 1690, and the oldest stone still standing in Cork. It is the kind of place you would never find on your own.