The Siege of Cork

In one week of September 1690, a Williamite army smashed the medieval walls of Cork and ended the city as a fortress. The siege was short, loud and decisive. It left a cannonball buried in the spire of St Fin Barre's, a king's son dead under the walls, and the old defences ruined for good.

A divided kingdom

The siege belonged to the wider war between two kings, the Catholic James and the Protestant William of Orange, being fought out across Ireland. Cork held for James, with a Jacobite garrison of some five thousand men behind its walls under Governor Roger MacElligott. In September 1690 William sent the Earl of Marlborough by sea to take the southern ports. Marlborough landed his army below the city while a second force of Danish troops closed in from the north. Cork was caught between them.

The walls fail

The city's walls stood fifty feet high and ten feet thick in places, but they were built for an older kind of war. Hills rise close on both sides, and from them the besiegers' cannon could fire down into the streets. The gunners even used the tall spire of the old St Fin Barre's as a lookout. A cannonball fired across the river from Elizabeth Fort struck the cathedral tower and lodged there. It was found still buried in the stone, ten metres up, when the church was rebuilt decades later, and it hangs in the cathedral today. Under that bombardment the walls were breached within days.

For the people inside, the week was terror. Shells fell into a crowded town with nowhere to shelter, and the marshy ground between the armies, where the attackers had to wade the river channels to reach the breach, filled with dead and wounded. The Williamite soldiers crossed under fire at low tide, took heavy losses, and still came on. By the time the garrison asked for terms, much of the walled town was wrecked. The siege lasted barely a week, but it ended Cork as a fortress and cleared the way for the open city of quays and bridges that grew up in its place.

The sack

As the Williamites reached the breach, Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Grafton and a son of Charles II, was shot leading the assault. He died of the wound at twenty-seven. The garrison surrendered on terms on 29 September, but the terms were not kept. The victorious troops sacked the city, looting and abusing the Catholic townspeople. The walls, already broken, were never rebuilt. Their stones went into the houses and quays of the open city that grew up in the decades after, the Cork you walk through now.

On the walk

We stand below St Fin Barre's and point out the cannonball from 1690, then trace the line of the lost walls through the modern streets, the scar the siege left on the plan of the city.