The Walled City

For five hundred years you could lock Cork. The Anglo-Normans who took the town in the 1170s built it on a string of marshy islands in the Lee, ringed it with a stone wall, and shut two gates on it every night. The whole thing was about the size of a big modern shopping centre. You can still walk it end to end in ten minutes, because the road between the two gates is North and South Main Street, and it is still the spine of the city.

The charter

In 1185 Prince John, the future King John of Robin Hood fame, was sent to Ireland by his father at the age of eighteen and handed Cork its first royal charter. It gave the townspeople the same rights as the merchants of Bristol: a market, a court, the power to run their own affairs and to keep outsiders from trading inside the walls. That charter is the founding document of the city. Cork counts its civic life from it, and threw a year-long party for its eight hundredth birthday in 1985. John also ordered the town walled properly and kept a corner of it for a royal castle, which is why there is a Castle Street running off the Grand Parade today.

An island of merchants

The town inside the wall never held more than a couple of thousand people, but they were rich for their size. It sat in the water like a ship, with quays opening straight onto the river trade, and a dozen or so families ran it between them. Hides, wool and fish went out. Wine, salt and iron came in from Bristol, Bordeaux and Spain. The Lee ran around the town and through it in tidal channels, and those channels are why St Patrick's Street and the Grand Parade curve the way they do. When you walk the flat of the city you are walking on the water the medieval town floated in.

Life inside was cramped, watchful and tightly run. The gates shut at curfew, strangers were noted, and the right to trade was guarded jealously by the families who held it. Outside the wall was 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, self-governing outlook lasted for centuries and it is still in the water here. When a Cork person tells you this is the real capital, you are hearing the reflex of a town that once ran itself behind a wall.

Where the walls went

The walls came down hard. They were battered in siege after siege and finally broken for good in September 1690, when Marlborough's guns on the hills either side punched a hole in them and the age of the walled city ended in a week. What was left of the stone went into cellars, quay walls and new foundations across the rebuilt town, so there is medieval wall under half the buildings in the centre. One stretch stands in the open in Bishop Lucey Park off the Grand Parade, and if you walk North Main Street and South Main Street you are walking gate to gate. Look at how narrow the frontages are: those are medieval plots, and some of the pubs you pass have been pouring drink on the same patch of ground for centuries.

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, which pubs sit on medieval plots, and the last piece of wall left standing in the open on the Grand Parade.