Youghal

At the eastern edge of the county, where the Blackwater meets the sea, sits a walled medieval port with one of the strangest CVs of any town in Ireland. Youghal has been run by Walter Raleigh, sold to the richest man in the kingdom for £1,500, kept its prisoners inside a clock, and played a Massachusetts whaling port for John Huston. Long stretches of its thirteenth-century town wall still stand on the hill above the main street, which is more than Cork city can say for its own.

Raleigh's town

Walter Raleigh, courtier, coloniser and favourite of Elizabeth I, was handed vast confiscated estates in east Cork after the Desmond rebellions were crushed in the 1580s, and served as mayor of Youghal in 1588, the year of the Armada. His house, the gabled Myrtle Grove, still stands beside the church. Two famous stories cling to it. One says Raleigh planted the first potatoes in Ireland in its garden. The other says a servant, seeing pipe smoke pouring off him, threw a bucket of water over his master to put him out. Both are almost certainly legend, the potato most likely reached Ireland by other routes, and Youghal tells them anyway. So do we.

What is documented is the sale. In 1602, with his fortunes failing and his head not long for his shoulders, Raleigh sold his 42,000 Irish acres to a sharp young official called Richard Boyle for £1,500. Boyle worked that bargain into the greatest fortune in Ireland and the title Earl of Cork, and fathered a scientist along the way, the Robert Boyle of Boyle's Law. His tomb, with its stacked painted effigies of wives and children, takes up the end of St Mary's Collegiate Church in the town. He designed it himself and made sure it was the biggest thing in the building.

The walls and the clock over the gaol

The town wall went up in the thirteenth century and much of it is still there, running along the hillside above the town with towers at the corners and a walk along the top. It is one of the best-preserved circuits in Ireland. Down on the main street the landmark is the Clock Gate Tower, built by the town corporation in 1777 on the site of a medieval gate, arching over the traffic 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 the shoppers looked up at them. 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 on the quays

Hollywood arrived in the summer of 1954, when John Huston chose Youghal to play New Bedford in Moby Dick. He wanted a port that had not changed in a hundred years, and he found one. Gregory Peck stalked the quays as Captain Ahab, thousands came out to watch, and locals earned a few pounds a day as extras in whalers' costume, some of them still in the town to tell you about it. Paddy Linehan's pub on the harbour renamed itself Moby Dick's for the occasion and kept the photographs on the walls for the next seventy years. It is still there. Go in.

On the walk

Cork city's own walls are gone, and the tour walks their ghost through the street plan. Youghal, an hour east by car or bus, is where you can still touch what a walled Irish port looked like, and it has a long sandy beach at the end of the street for afterwards.