Shandon
& the Bells

Stand at the Berwick Fountain on Grand Parade at the right moment on a Sunday morning and you will hear it before you see it: the bells of Shandon, rolling down the hill and over the rooftops. St Anne's Church has been doing this since 1752, when the bells were first installed, and the sound has been one of the defining sounds of Cork ever since.

The church sits on the north side of the city, up the hill from the river in the old Shandon quarter. Its tower is the thing people know, 36 metres tall and built from two kinds of stone. The north and west faces are red sandstone, quarried locally. The south and east faces are white limestone. Red and white are the colours of Cork, and the church wears them literally.

The four-faced liar

The tower has a clock on each of its four faces. The four clocks have always kept slightly different times. The mechanism that drives them was never precise enough to keep them synchronised, and the years of Cork weather have not helped. At any given moment, each face shows a different time. The tower earned its nickname, "the four-faced liar," in the eighteenth century and it has stuck.

The nickname is affectionate. Cork treats the unreliability as a local character trait, something to be explained to visitors with a certain pride.

The bells themselves

The eight bells were cast in Gloucester in 1750 and hung in the tower in 1752. The original plan was for a peal of eight, tuned to the scale of C major. The heaviest weighs over 1,200 kilograms, and all eight are still rung by hand. Visitors can climb the tower and ring them. There is a music stand with sheets for well-known tunes, and the sound travels across a large part of the city.

The tradition of climbing Shandon to ring the bells is an old one in Cork, and it has not lost its hold. On any weekend morning you are likely to hear imperfect but enthusiastic attempts at Danny Boy or some other tune drifting down over the Northside. The imperfection is part of it.

The salmon and the fish

On top of the tower, above the clock, there is a weathervane in the shape of a salmon, eleven feet long and covered in gold leaf. This too is an old Cork emblem. The Lee and its tributaries were salmon rivers, and the fish appears in the city's coat of arms. The gilded salmon at the top of Shandon turns with the wind and has been doing so since the eighteenth century.

On the walk

We pass through Shandon and stop at the church. We explain the two stones, the four clocks, the bells and the salmon. The tower is open to climb and ring independently. The tour does not go up, but we explain how the building works and tell you the history of the quarter around it, which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas of Cork city.