Spike Island

In the middle of Cork Harbour sits an island that has been a monastery, a fortress and, for a stretch of the Victorian years, the largest prison on earth. Spike Island packs thirteen centuries into a hundred acres you can walk round in an hour, and you reach it the only way anyone ever has, by boat from Cobh. Everybody who ever landed here arrived looking at the same grey walls. Most of them were not coming by choice.

From monks to muskets

A monastery stood on Spike as early as the seventh century, one of the quiet island houses of early Christian Ireland, and for a thousand years that was all the island was. Then the harbour became too valuable to leave unguarded. From 1779, with revolution in America and trouble coming in France, the British began fortifying the island to protect the great naval anchorage of Cork Harbour, and the work grew into a 24-acre star fort with six bastions and a dry moat you could lose a house in. They called it Fort Westmoreland. It is one of the biggest fortifications ever built in Ireland, and the harbour it was built to defend never was attacked.

The convict island

Then the Famine filled Ireland's courts with the starving, and in 1847 the government opened a convict depot inside the fortress walls. It swelled at a terrible speed. Men were sent here for stealing a sheep, a coat, a loaf, and by 1850 more than two thousand of them were held on the island, more than Dartmoor, Pentonville or any prison in the British Isles. For a few years in the 1850s Spike was likely the biggest prison anywhere in the world. The healthy were shipped onward to Australia and Bermuda. The sick, and there were many, are buried on the island in unmarked ground. The nationalist John Mitchel passed through in 1848 on his way to transportation, wrote about the place with fury, and a century later the new Irish State named the fort after him.

The last British flag

Under the Treaty of 1921 Spike stayed in British hands as one of the Treaty Ports, a piece of the Empire sitting in an Irish harbour for seventeen years after independence. It came home on 11 July 1938. The garrison marched down to the pier, the tricolour went up over the fort, and Éamon de Valera stood on the parade ground to watch it happen. The Irish Army kept it as Fort Mitchel, and from 1985 to 2004 it was a prison again, this time for young offenders. The riot of 1985, when the inmates took the island for a night and burned part of it, is still within living memory in Cork, and plenty of people on the north side can tell you exactly where they were.

The boats come back

Today the boats from Cobh carry visitors instead of convicts. The island reopened as a heritage site in 2016 and the following year the World Travel Awards named it Europe's leading tourist attraction, ahead of the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum, which caused some amusement in Cork and none at all in Paris. You walk the cells, the punishment block, the gun batteries and the glacis, and the ferry gives you the best view of Cobh you will get. People call it Ireland's Alcatraz. That does it an injustice. Alcatraz only ran for thirty 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, twenty-five minutes from the city by train, and we will tell you how to line the two up in one day.