Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article, Cork Independent, 

Eighteenth Century Cork Walking Tour

Thursday 24 October 2013

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.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Cork was a prosperous, wealthy city. In 1732, Edward Lloyd, an English travel writer, wrote that the population of the city was 40,000 and that the shops were ‘neatly fitted and sorted with rich goods’. In addition, there were a lot of new buildings being constructed and many others being reconstructed. Lloyd detailed that the city had a large export trade with almost 59,000 barrels of beef exported from Cork per annum – half the full total for Ireland.

A report by two unnamed touring Englishmen in 1748 noted that the economy of Cork was booming and that provisions of all kinds were available at reasonable prices. These included meat, fish, fowl, fruits such as strawberries, and tubers. The main fish sold in the city market was salmon, turbot and crayfish. The main trading exports comprised beef, hides, butter and tallow (animal fat), which were been sent to all parts of the known world. The gentlemen mention that during the previous slaughtering season, between mid-August and Christmas 1747, a total of 90,000 black cattle were killed. Restrictions on exports such as wool were easily circumvented through illegal black-market trading. Their closing remarks on Cork are very interesting – they noted Cork people had no recognizable accent, which points to a great mix of nationalities residing and trading in the city.

Whereas the merchant classes were enjoying the profits of growing trade links, life for the lower classes was not as easy. In 1730, the population was 56,000; by 1790 the population of the urban area had increased to 73,000. This was a significant increase in a relatively short period of time; 100 years earlier, in 1690, the population had been just 20,000.

This population explosion caused many social problems. Crime was a serious issue for the city. In the early 1740s Mayor Hugh Winter employed fifteen watchmen to walk around the city at night between eleven o’ clock and sunrise to protect the citizens. Eleven o’clock was the city’s curfew, and any person caught outdoors after that time faced prosecution or expulsion. Robbery was common, with money and clothing often reported missing. Items such as silk, lead, swords were targeted by thieves too, and the raiding of cellars for food was also common. There were two gaols in the eighteenth-century city, one overlooking South Gate Bridge and the other overlooking North Gate Bridge. These gaols housed debtors and malefactors.

Another huge problem was the number of destitute children left homeless on the streets. On the western side of the south suburbs was a long row of cabins called the Devil’s Drop. Here, the doors were thronged with children with little or no food. The origin of the name Devil’s Drop is unknown, but probably refers to the degrading conditions in which the inhabitants lived. On 12 March 1747, a poor house was opened on what is now Leitrim Street.

Floods were common in the city and caused great damage. Rare high tides and flooding forced the inhabitants of the city to pass from house to house in boats. This had even happened even in the middle of North and South Main Street. Houses and warehouses on the quays had to be protected from flooding every winter by blocking up doors.

In stark contrast to these descriptions of misery, Smith also detailed the expansion of the city in previous decades. In particular, he highlighted the building of the many quays, the most notable being the Custom House Quay (now Emmett Place), the Coal Quay or Ferry Quay, Kyrl’s quay and the North quay (now Pope’s Quay). The largest canal in the city was that which is now covered by St Patrick’s Street – picture the footpaths on this street as the location of the old quaysides and the road as a canal. The Grand Parade was made up of three quays: Tuckey’s Quay (outside Argos), Post Office Quay (outside the City Library) and the Mall (on the site of the old Capital Cineplex).

Caption:

714a. October light at St Finbarre’s Cathedral (picture: Kieran McCarthy)