A winter’s tale: A guide to Cork city's gems this winter
Cork is a winter city. It comes into its own in early October, gets into full gear with the Jazz Festival and buzzes furiously, beautifully, until late May or early June of the following year.
There are days in winter when you should just open the Cork Handbook and follow its pages.
The streets are its pages. The wind and rain doesn’t matter. Some days in winter I treat myself to a complete feast of the place.
Today, for example, I walked the city through the winter daylight hours, beginning with early breakfast at the Farmgate Café; a spell in the City Library’s Reference Room; several meetings in the Long Valley bar with complaining published and complaining unpublished poets; a look at the new watch display in Keane’s Jewellers’ windows; an afternoon drink in the beautiful Chateau Bar on St Patrick St where I flicked through the new whiskey list with Michael Reidy; a wander into Waterstones to buy another copy of Derek Mahon’s Against the Clock; a walk to UCC and a cup of coffee with my brother, Kevin, now celebrating 25 years on the college staff.
Then I walked along the Mardyke to see the perfect winter planting in Fitzgerald’s Park (the City Council’s seasonal planting is among the public glories of Cork); on to the Shakey Bridge, a view of the riverside gardens of Sunday’s Well; then back onto Western Rd near Gaol Cross to catch the No 8 bus to the increasingly chic quarter of St Lukes.
I remember a day in 2005 when I walked the streets of Cork with Judit Bor, an official from the Cultural Ministry in Budapest. She was on a fact-finding mission because a Hungarian city was going to host the European Capital of Culture at some future date.
Dr Bor loved the city, the “European feel” of it she insisted she felt, a feeling that so many mainly French visitors to Cork kept repeating to me that year. Having briefed her on the Cork2005 programming process, I took her to a Cork Orchestral Society recital by the Greek pianist Magda Nikolaidou; the Athens and Paris-trained pianist playing Rachmaninov, Chopin, Y. Constadinidis, and M. Hadjidakis.
I remember the intense atmosphere, the extreme heat of the packed auditorium in the Crawford, and all the while a sense of the absent presence of those Olympians of Cork life, Aloys Fleischman and Sheila Goldberg.
How proud they would have been of what the Cork Orchestral Society had done in 2005. Then I went with Dr Bor to lunch at the Ballymaloe Café in the Crawford. After that, I took her shopping — shopping not gawking — in the English Market, visited St Peter’s and Paul’s Church and then returned to the great Barry nexhibition.
All the while we carried on a long conversation about the Cork2005 experience and the troubles and tensions in cities that carry the burden of that designation.
The Hungarian official and I parted at the door of the Crawford Gallery. She was an art historian by profession and she wanted to absorb the James Barry exhibition all over again.
She was also intrigued by the Canova Casts and how they ended up in Cork, creating a sensation when exhibited by candlelight and inspiring an entire generation of neo-Classical Cork painters and sculptors.
She was impressed, too, by the total package that constituted our beautiful winter city; the energy of Patrick Street; the aromas of the English Market; the burning candles and Pugin High Church interior of St Peter’s and Paul’s; the John Berger and Marisa Camino Exhibition then showing at the Vanguard Gallery; the programme book that I saw her flicking through as she listened to Chopin’s ‘Nocturne in D’ on Nikolaidou’s piano.
At such moments, in any year, Cork City makes a deep impression upon an educated stranger. And it is a deeply impressive city.
But this deep city is hidden from plain sight. It is a very deceptive place, seeing itself always as a business city, not a tourist city.
Cork people just refuse to accept that their city might become a tourist destination: For Corkonians, the city is a place for transactions, medical and legal appointments, and court sittings, a point of arrivals and departures for West Cork, a buying and selling space.
Also, in the days we now live in, a collection point for the homeless.
A long-developed habit of big-heartedness is in the Cork psyche.
Its streets are kind because of a very precise kind of history.
In 1847/48 Cork City absorbed thousands upon thousands of destitute Famine victims, but there were already an estimated 20,000 destitute poor, landless and idle paupers, in the 12 Poor Law wards of Cork City — in September 1846, for example, the inmates of the Cork Poorhouse were so moved by the poverty of those left outside the Poorhouse gates that they began to donate some of their own daily rations to non-inmates.
On the morning of September 29, 1846, as many as 1,438 men, women, and children were given breakfast on the street at the Poorhouse gates. This habit of pity, of sharing, is deeply ingrained.
It is part of the nobility of the city, a big-heartedness that should be kept in mind when complaining about Cork snobbery.
In some strange way the two are interconnected. Both stem from pride, and confidence that Cork has given its older, bourgeois citizens a full plate of life that can be shared without too much anxiety.
But in 40 years of walking these streets, I’ve discovered that it’s French tourists who constitute the most enthusiastic visitor groups in Cork, searching for something mystical in the city as well as the hinterland.
Yet there are few public signs in French, few free guides to paintings, buildings, writers, music in French so that a French person might be made to feel completely welcome.
You need to love the people who support you — or support the people who love you.
A French stranger would have to look closely or read widely and searchingly to see the places that Charles Dickens saw on his visits; that corner of Daunt’s Square where Lord Edward FitzGerald dined with patriots; the Beamish house where Thomas Moore had his pint and listened to stories of Sarah Curran; the Margaret St and Mary St of Patrick Galvin’s writings; the Imperial Hotel where Thomas Carlyle and Frederick Douglass dined; the café where Rory Gallagher sang his first songs; the spot where Charlotte Bronte on her honeymoon stood to get a better view of Shandon’s Bells; the Savoy where Gigli sang; the house where George Boole lived; the corner where Daniel Maclise had his first atelier; the Prout tomb that Samuel Becket visited before he departed from Ireland and the Mardyke where he gave sixpence to a vagrant; the same Mardyke where Micheál MacLiammóir pretended he’d walked; the same Mardyke where the young Cork novelist David Marcus watched his first cricket matches.
You could say that only educated people should be encouraged to visit Cork, that there is little here to cater for the ignorant, but, really, there’s always food and drink.
Surely, everyone can enjoy good food. And such wonderful food and drink! There’s Isaac’s in MacCurtain St; Catherine and Michael Ryan’s restaurant still holding to its Arbutus Lodge standards after all these years, still giving us a lovely place to meet and eat; and there’s Greene’s and the marvellous cocktail bar, Cask, beside it (as well as the revamped, new cocktail bar in the Gresham Metropole; then there’s Market Lane in Oliver Plunkett St, a place with consistently relaxed and lovely staff; and what about the beautiful Farmgate Café in the English Market where that young genius Rebecca Harte now rules the roost; and the two lively places on Washington St, SpitJacks and Liberty Grill; or The Chateau on St Patrick St, one of the loveliest bars in Ireland with a terrific cheeseboard and the best selection of whiskeys in the south; not forgetting Electric on South Mall, and Orso off it, and the hidden gem, South’s, a place for a glass of prosecco and generous fish cakes.
There’s the marvellous vegetarian-vegan menu at Jacobs’s on South Mall; vegetables at Cafe Paradiso near the College gates; the lovely vegan restaurant beneath the railway bridge on Lower Glanmire Rd.
And then there’s the Quay Co-Op, a vegetarian wonderland with an incredible food- store beneath. I challenge you to walk through the extended Co-Op foodstore and not feel your cholesterol dropping rapidly.
So food, yes, everywhere in Cork, food everywhere since the market days of the Eoghanacht King Cormac.
But then there’s the deeper city, I would encourage people never to abandon their lifelong search for this deep city; its built heritage — the 1920s sweep of St Patrick’s Street, lovingly architect-redesigned after the Burning; Cork’s libraries and School of Music, its huge range of authors from Daniel Corkery to Leanne O’Sullivan, its artists from James Barry to Maud Cotter.
At Christmas I think of Frank O’Connor’s An Only Child or his Larry Delaney stories, or O’Faolain’s Vive Moi, or the teeming Cork life in Corkery’s ‘The Cobbler’s Den’ sequence in A Munster Twilight, or Mary Leland’s The Killeen or The Little Galloway Girls, or Eilean Ni Chuilleanain’s Cork with Brian Lalor or Liam O Murchú’s wonderful Black Cat in the Window.
The thing is, once you start with Cork you’ll never get finished.
Thomas McCarthy is a Waterford poet who worked for many years at Cork City Libraries. His first book was published nin 1978.
His 10th collection of poems, Prophecy, will be published by Carcanet Press in April, 2019.
