St Fin Barre

Follow the River Lee west, past the city and out beyond Macroom, and you reach a still lake ringed by mountains. On a small island, joined to the shore by a stone causeway, stands an oratory. This is Gougane Barra, and a hermit named Finbarr lived here in the sixth century. The city of Cork, forty kilometres east, grew out of what he did after he left.

Finbarr was born in West Cork around the year 550, the son of a metalworker. The records that survive are thin and mixed with legend, but the shape of his life is clear enough. He trained for the church, took the name Fionnbharr, meaning "fair crest," and chose the hard road of the hermit. The island in the lake at the source of the Lee became his retreat. Followers came to him there, and a small community grew on the water.

The monastery in the marsh

Around the year 606 Finbarr came downriver to the place where the Lee broke into channels and spread out across a low, wet plain. The Irish called it corcach mór, the great marsh. He founded a monastery and a school on a firm rise of ground at the edge of the water. The school drew students from across Ireland and beyond, and the settlement that gathered around it took the name of the marsh that surrounded it. Corcach became Corcaigh became Cork.

The marsh dictated everything that followed. The first streets ran along the spines of dry ground between the channels, and the line of those channels still shapes where the city centre sits today. When you cross from the South Mall to St Patrick's Street, you are crossing ground that was once open water. Finbarr chose the spot, and the spot made the city.

What he left behind

Finbarr died around 623, said to have been at Cloyne, and was buried back in his own monastery by the Lee. The community he started kept his name and his teaching for centuries. The Vikings raided it, the Normans rebuilt around it, and the medieval city of Cork rose on the same low islands he had chosen.

His monastery is gone, but its ground is still in use. St Fin Barre's Cathedral, the three-spired Gothic building by William Burges that opened in 1879, stands on the exact site. The city keeps his feast day on 25 September, and his name sits on the cathedral, the streets and the city's own arms. For a man who set out to live alone on a lake, he left a remarkable amount of company behind.

On the walk

We stop at St Fin Barre's Cathedral and tell you whose ground you are standing on. We explain the marsh, the meaning of the name, and how a hermit's school on a rise above the water set the first lines of the streets you have been walking all morning.