The Great Famine

The Famine changed Cork more than any battle. When the blight struck in the autumn of 1845 the crop that fed most of the country turned black in the ground, and it came back year after year. Over seven years about a million people died of hunger and the fevers that followed it, and a million more left. The population fell by a quarter and has never recovered. County Cork was one of the worst-hit places in Ireland, and the city was its funnel: the place the starving walked towards for relief, and the port the survivors sailed from. To understand modern Cork you have to stand in these years first, and on the walk we do.

Why it cut so deep

Millions of the rural poor lived almost entirely on the potato, grown on tiny plots they rented from landlords or their agents. It was cheap, it grew in poor ground, and an acre of it would feed a family. When it failed there was nothing underneath. Grain, cattle and butter kept leaving the ports, including this one, while people starved on the roads outside, because the food belonged to somebody else and the rent still had to be paid. Relief came slowly and often cruelly, tied to road schemes that paid too little to buy a meal and to workhouses that spread fever as fast as they gave shelter. By the winter of 1846 whole districts of West Cork were dying. A Cork magistrate called Nicholas Cummins rode into Skibbereen that December and wrote a letter to the Duke of Wellington describing what he found. The London papers printed it, and sent an artist.

Cork at the centre

The Cork Union Workhouse on the Douglas Road, the building that is St Finbarr's Hospital today, was built for about two thousand people and held far more, with fever sheds overflowing into the yards. Soup kitchens ran in the lanes. The Quakers, the Society of Friends, set up some of the most effective relief in the city while official help lagged behind, and their soup house on Grattan Street fed thousands a day. The dead came faster than the graves. Many were buried without coffins in mass plots at Carr's Hill on the edge of the city, the ground opened again and again through the worst winters. A few streets from the workhouse ordinary life carried on. The two Corks, the fed and the starving, lived within sight of each other.

The quays and Cobh

Cork was a great port, so it became one of the great points of departure. Emigrants crowded the city quays and the harbour at Cove, soon to be renamed Queenstown, boarding ships for Liverpool, North America and Australia. The worst crossings were so bad that the vessels were remembered as coffin ships, and on some of them a fifth of the passengers died before they saw land. Cobh went on to become the single most important emigration port in Ireland, and the Famine is where that story starts. If your family left Ireland, there is a fair chance the story runs through these quays, and it is the moment that connects almost every Cork family to somewhere else in the world.

On the walk

This is not a comfortable part of the walk, but it is one of the most important. We stop on the quays the emigrants left from and talk about the workhouse, the soup kitchens and the burial ground on the hill, and we tell you who was there. It is the moment that connects almost every Cork family to somewhere else in the world.