St Fin Barre's
Cathedral

Cork begins here. In the seventh century a monk named Fin Barre founded a monastery on the marshy south bank of the Lee, and a settlement grew up around it. The Irish name for the city, Corcaigh, means marsh, and the cathedral still stands on the spot where that first community prayed. For more than a thousand years a church of some kind has held this ground.

The building you see today is far younger, and the work of one obsessive mind. It is the most complete Gothic Revival cathedral in Ireland, and almost every inch of it came from the same hand.

The competition

By the 1860s the plain Georgian church on the site was too small and too dull for the Church of Ireland, which held a competition for a replacement. They expected something modest within a tight budget.

A little-known thirty-five-year-old London architect named William Burges won it with a design far grander, and far more expensive, than the brief allowed. He talked the committee round, then spent much of the rest of his life seeing it built.

He treated the cathedral as his masterpiece and designed nearly everything in it himself, from the spires down to the floor tiles, the metalwork, the furniture and the door handles.

Burges’s masterpiece

Work ran from 1865 to 1879 in pale Cork limestone, in the French Gothic style Burges loved. Three spires rise over the river, the tallest reaching nearly 240 feet and visible across the city.

Inside and out he packed more than a thousand pieces of sculpture: angels, prophets, beasts and scenes from scripture, carved in stone and worked in marble and mosaic. Few cathedrals of its size carry so much detail, and almost none carry the stamp of a single designer so completely.

Step inside for the mosaic floor, the great rose window, and the pulpit and bishop’s throne he designed as part of the whole. Nothing in it is accidental.

The golden angel and the cannonball

High on the eastern end stands the Resurrection Angel, sheathed in gold leaf and catching the light above the rooftops. Burges placed it there on purpose. Local belief holds that the angel will sound its trumpets when the end of the world is near, and that Cork, naturally, will get the warning first.

Near the entrance hangs a cannonball, fired during the Siege of Cork in 1690 and later found lodged in the tower of the older church. It is a blunt reminder that this calm building sits in a city that has been fought over for centuries.

On the tour

We start where Cork started. The cathedral marks the founding of the city and sets the scene for everything that follows on the walk, from the marsh and the monastery to the merchants, the rebels and the river. Look up for the angel before we move on.