Spike Island

In the middle of Cork Harbour lies an island that has been a monastery, a fortress, and, for a stretch of the Victorian era, the largest prison in the world. Spike Island packs 1,300 years of Irish history into 104 acres, and you reach it the only way anyone ever has: by boat from Cobh.

From monks to muskets

A monastery stood on Spike as early as the 7th century, one of the quiet island houses of early Christian Ireland. The guns came a thousand years later. From 1779, with revolution in America and France on the horizon, the British began fortifying the island to guard the great naval anchorage of Cork Harbour, and the work grew into a 24-acre star fort, Fort Westmoreland, one of the largest fortifications ever built in Ireland.

The convict island

Then the Famine filled Ireland's courts with the desperate, and in 1847 the government opened a convict depot inside the fortress walls. It swelled at a terrible speed. By 1850 more than 2,000 men were held on the island, more than Dartmoor, Pentonville or any prison in the British Isles, and for a few years in the 1850s Spike was likely the biggest prison anywhere on earth. Many of its convicts were shipped onward to Australia and Bermuda. The nationalist John Mitchel passed through in 1848 on his way to transportation, and a century later the new Irish State gave the fort his name.

Under the Treaty of 1921, Spike stayed in British hands as part of a "Treaty Port" even after independence. It came home on 11 July 1938, when the garrison sailed out and the tricolour went up over the fort with Taoiseach Éamon de Valera watching. The island served the Irish State as Fort Mitchel, and from 1985 to 2004 it was a prison again; the riot of 1985, when inmates took over and burned part of the island, is within living memory in Cork.

Today the boats from Cobh carry visitors instead of convicts. The island reopened as a heritage site in 2016, and in 2017 the World Travel Awards named it Europe's leading tourist attraction, beating the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum. The "Ireland's Alcatraz" nickname does it an injustice: Alcatraz only ran for 30 years.

On the walk

The Famine story on the city tour explains what filled Spike Island: the courts of the 1840s and the crime of being hungry. The boat to the island leaves from Cobh, 25 minutes from the city by train.