East Cork

If you travel from the mainland by road, you’re hardly aware that Fota is an island in Cork Harbour. Its main attraction is Fota House, built in the 1740s as a hunting lodge for the Barry family, whose main seat had by then moved from nearby Barryscourt Castle to Castlelyons near Fermoy. In the early nineteenth century, the house was substantially redeveloped and extended in elegant, Neoclassical style, and now lies a ten-minute walk from Fota train station. Excellent guided tours reveal plenty of telling details, with the highlights being the entrance hall, a beautifully symmetrical space divided by striking ochre columns of scagliola (imitation marble), and the ceiling of the drawing room, with its plasterwork doves, musical instruments and hunting implements and delicately painted cherubs and floral motifs. The tour also goes below stairs to the servants’ quarters, which include an impressive octagonal game-larder and such features as gaps at the top of the windows of the butler’s servery – added so that food smells would tantalize the poor servants rather than the house guests. For visitors, there’s now a nice little café in the long gallery and billiard room. Much of the estate’s formal gardens and its internationally significant arboretum, laid out in the mid-nineteenth century, are under the care of the Office of Public Works, with free access. At its best in April and May, the arboretum hosts a wide range of exotic trees and shrubs, with many rare examples, including some magnificent Lebanese cedars, a Victorian fernery and a lush, almost tropical lake.

On the southern coast of Great Island, with extensive views of Cork Harbour, COBH (pronounced “cove”) makes a great escape from the city on a fine day. This historic and unpretentious resort, clinging onto a steep, south-facing slope, sports a stony beach, a promenade with a bandstand and gaily painted rows of Victorian hotels and houses. Much of the tourist traffic comes now from the dozens of huge cruise-liners that dock here every year, continuing a long tradition for this fine, natural harbour: Cobh was a port of call for the Sirius, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, in 1838, and for the Titanic on her disastrous maiden voyage in 1912. The port was also a major supply-depot during the American and Napoleonic wars, and became Ireland’s main point of emigration after the Great Famine. This long and often tragic seafaring history is vividly detailed at the Queenstown Story, a heritage centre in the former Victorian train station on the seafront (the town was renamed Queenstown after a visit by Queen Victoria in 1849, but its old name was restored after Independence). If your appetite for salty tales and memorabilia still hasn’t been sated, get along to the Cobh Museum, housed in a nineteenth-century Presbyterian church on the west side of the town centre.

YOUGHAL (pronounced “yawl”) enjoys a lush, picturesque setting on the west bank of the River Blackwater’s estuary, the border with County Waterford. It was one of Ireland’s leading ports in the medieval era, with a scattering of ancient buildings to show for it, and later became a centre for the carpet industry, but today it is popular with holidaying Irish families, who take their leisure on the long, sandy, Blue Flag beach to the southwest.