Youghal

At the eastern edge of County Cork, where the Blackwater meets the sea, sits a walled medieval port with one of the strangest CVs of any Irish town. Youghal has been governed by Walter Raleigh, sold to the richest man in Ireland for £1,500, locked its prisoners inside a clock, and played a Massachusetts whaling port for John Huston. Long stretches of its 13th-century town walls still stand, among the best preserved in Ireland.

Raleigh's town

Walter Raleigh, courtier, coloniser and favourite of Elizabeth I, held vast confiscated estates in east Cork after the crushing of the Desmond rebellions, and served as mayor of Youghal in 1588. His house, the gabled Myrtle Grove, still stands beside the church. Two famous stories cling to it: that Raleigh planted Ireland's first potatoes in its garden, and that a servant, seeing pipe smoke pouring off him, doused Raleigh with a bucket of water. Both are almost certainly legend, and Youghal tells them anyway; the potato most likely reached Ireland by other routes.

What is documented is the sale. In 1602, with his fortunes failing, Raleigh sold his 42,000 Irish acres to Richard Boyle for £1,500. Boyle worked that bargain into the greatest fortune in the kingdom and the title Earl of Cork; his tomb, with its stacked effigies, dominates St Mary's Collegiate Church in the town, one of Ireland's finest medieval churches.

The clock over the gaol

Youghal's landmark is the Clock Gate Tower, built by the town corporation in 1777 on the site of a medieval gate, arching over the main street with a clock on its face and, until 1837, the town gaol in its upper floors. Prisoners looked down on the shopping street below, and after the 1798 rebellion, rebels were hanged from its windows. The tower reopened to visitors in 2017, and the story is told floor by floor on the way up.

Hollywood arrived in the summer of 1954, when John Huston chose Youghal to play New Bedford in Moby Dick, wanting "a port that hadn't changed in a hundred years". Gregory Peck stalked the quays as Captain Ahab, thousands came to watch, and locals earned pounds a day as extras in whalers' costume. A harbourside pub renamed itself Moby Dick's and kept the photographs on the walls for the next seventy years.

On the walk

Cork city's own walls are gone, and the tour walks their ghost through the street plan. Youghal, an hour east, is where you can still touch what a walled Irish port looked like.