The Walled City

For five hundred years Cork was a walled island. The Anglo-Normans who took the city in the twelfth century built it on a cluster of marshy islets in the River Lee, ringed it in stone, and locked it each night behind two gates. The shape of that walled town still rules where you walk. The long Main Street between the gates is the spine of the city to this day.

The charter

In 1185 the future King John, then a young prince, granted Cork its first royal charter, giving the citizens the same liberties as the merchants of Bristol. The charter made Cork a chartered town with a market, a mayor and rights of its own, and it set the merchant families who ran it on the road to wealth. John also ordered the city walled and kept a corner of it for a royal fortress. Cork has counted its civic life from that charter ever since, and in 1985 it marked eight hundred years of it.

An island of merchants

The walled town was small, a few thousand people at most, but rich for its size. It sat on the water like a ship, its quays opening straight onto the river trade. A dozen or so merchant families ran it, growing wealthy on hides and wool sent out and wine, salt and iron brought in from France, Spain and beyond. The Lee ran through and around the town in tidal channels, and those channels are the reason St Patrick's Street and the Grand Parade curve the way they do. You walk on the water the medieval city floated on.

Life inside the walls was cramped, watchful and tightly controlled. The gates were shut at curfew, strangers were noted, and the right to trade was guarded jealously by the families who held it. Beyond the walls lay Gaelic Ireland, often hostile, and the town looked to the sea and to England far more than to the country at its back. That guarded outlook lasted for centuries and shaped the city's character: independent, mercantile, and quick to call itself a place apart. The habit Corkonians still keep, of naming Cork the real capital, is an old reflex of a town that once governed itself behind a wall.

Where the walls went

The walls came down hard. Battered in siege after siege, they were finally shattered in 1690, when a Williamite army breached them and the age of the walled city ended. The stones were carried off and built into the houses and quays that took their place. A surviving stretch of the medieval wall stands re-erected in Bishop Lucey Park on the Grand Parade, and the names North Main Street and South Main Street still trace the road between the vanished gates.

On the walk

We walk the spine of the old walled city down South Main Street and show you where the gates stood, where the river ran, and the last piece of medieval wall left standing on the Grand Parade.