St Fin Barre

Follow the River Lee west, out past the city and beyond Macroom, and you come to a still lake ringed by mountains where the river starts. On a small island joined to the shore by a stone causeway stands a little oratory. This is Gougane Barra, and a hermit called Finbarr lived on the island in the sixth century. The city of Cork, forty kilometres downstream, grew out of what he did after he left it.

The hermit on the lake

Finbarr was born in West Cork around the year 550, the son of a metalworker, and the records that survive are thin and mixed with legend, but the shape of the life is clear enough. He trained for the church, took the name Fionnbharr, meaning fair-haired, and chose the hard road of the hermit. The island in the lake at the source of the Lee became his retreat. Followers came out to him there, as they always did to Irish hermits who wanted to be left alone, and a small community grew up on the water. The stone cells whose walls you can still walk between on the island are much later, but they stand where the tradition says his did.

The monastery in the marsh

Around the year 606 Finbarr came downriver to the place where the Lee broke into channels and spread across a low, wet plain before the sea. The Irish called it corcach mór, the great marsh. He founded a monastery and a school on a firm rise of ground at the southern edge of the water, and the school drew students from across Ireland and beyond. The settlement that gathered around it took its name from the marsh it sat in. 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 decides where the city centre sits. When you cross from the South Mall to St Patrick's Street you are crossing what was open water. Finbarr chose the spot, and the spot made the city.

What he left behind

Finbarr died around 623, at Cloyne by most accounts, and was carried back and buried in his own monastery by the Lee. The community he started kept his name and his school going for centuries. The Vikings raided it, the Normans built their walled town beside it, and the medieval city rose on the same low islands he had chosen. His monastery is long gone but its ground has never gone out of use. St Fin Barre's Cathedral, the three-spired Gothic building William Burges finished in 1879, stands on the exact site. The city keeps his feast on 25 September, his name is on the cathedral, the streets, the hospital and the city's own arms, and there is a Cork saying that anyone who visits Gougane Barra will come back. 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. If you have a car, Gougane Barra is an hour and a half west and worth every minute of it.