The weather is still relatively mild, so the next historical walking tour is on Saturday 26 October 2013 –Making a Venice of the North, Exploring Eighteenth Century Cork City, explore a world of canals, and eighteenth century Cork society, meet at Cork City Library, Grand Parade, 2pm (E.5, duration: two hours).

The tour is bound with the demise of the walled town of Cork in the early 1700s. For nearly five hundred years (c.1200-c.1690), the walled port town of Cork, built in a swamp and at the lowest crossing point of the River Lee and the tidal area, remained as one of the most fortified and vibrant walled settlements in the expanding British colonial empire. However, economic growth as well as political events in late seventeenth century Ireland, culminating in the Williamite Siege of Cork in 1690, provided the catalyst for large-scale change within the urban area. The walls were allowed to decay and this was to inadvertently alter much of the city’s physical, social and economic character in the ensuing century.