Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 21 August 2014

Heritage Week, 23-31 August – Carved from a Swamp

Cork Heritage Open Day and Heritage Week are looming – a kind of Christmas week – for a heritage fanatic like me. It is great to see the city’s local history and natural heritage being focussed on. Indeed as a city, we need to celebrate it more publicly and more regularly. This city’s growth on a swamp is in itself a story on which a whole series of talks and walks can be based. I am always in awe at the geologists’ reports on beneath this urban space – that below the swamp are multiple tree stumps of a broken down forest flooded out through sea level rise from over 20,000 years ago. The city’s buildings continue to sink into this space -20,000 years in the making – with each generation struggling to carve its own ‘safe harbour’. 

This city is built on a shift-shaping landscape – sand and gravel, rushes and reeds – a wetland knitted together to create a working port through the ages. It is also the multi-faceted narratives that knit this place together. Standing in Bishop Lucey Park, for example, are multiple monuments – remnants of the blocks of the town walls, the arches for the old Corn Market gates (once behind City Hall), the smiling shawlie within Seamus Murphy’s statue, and the swans of the fountain representing Cork 800. The fountain was placed there in 1985, a nod to the city’s celebration of  800 years since the city’s first charter in 1185. Then there is the imposing sinking tower of Christ Church and its ruinous graveyard to the ghostly feel of the buildings that once stood at the park’s entrance. Along the latter stretch, living memory has recorded Jennings furniture shop, destroyed by fire in 1970; the toy shop of Percy Diamond who was cantor (a singer of liturgical music) at the Jewish synagogue; and the Fountain Café over which the famous hurler Christy Ring had a flat for a time. Of course when I mention just these strands, there are other layers I have not mentioned. The layered memories at times and their fleshed out contexts are endless and often seem timeless.

The presence of all these monuments in the Park often play with my own mind on every walking tour – there is so much one can show and say. These urban spaces seem to slide between the past and present, between material and symbolic worlds. The mural by Mayfield Community Arts on the gable end of the shop next door to the park, entitled “connecting our imagination, how do we imagine a positive future” is apt. The past does play on the imagination; it interconnects between spaces and times into our present and future. It creates at many times, when studying this city, partial memories that the scholar can only reconstruct in part and tentatively in the mind. Memories flow and bend across the story of the development of this North Atlantic big hearted small city.

The kept town walls are a space as a city we need to keep even better. Sometimes we don’t mind these spaces enough. The green rusty plaque on it indicates its age of thirteenth century. During its excavation shards of pottery from Normandy, from the Saintonge region of France, from England, and from other parts of Ireland were also found during the excavation of the wall. For nearly 500 years (1170s to 1690), the town wall symbolised the urbanity of Cork and gave its citizens an identity within the town itself. The walls served as a vast repository of symbolism, iconography and ideology, as symbols of order and social relationships. Indeed the same can be said of all the buildings and spaces the public learn about on this Saturday and next week across talks and walks.

The former town walls like this city were rebuilt in parts by inhabitants through hundreds of years. The river and the tide eroded at their base taking away the various sandstone and limestone blocks and perhaps re-shaping the more resistant ones. The surviving section in Bishop Lucey Park invites the visitor to reflect on life and resistance within the town and how layered the city’s story is. There is wear and tear on the stones presented, which cross from the era of the walled town to the modern city. It invokes the imagination and if anything the wear and tear on our built heritage allows our minds to wonder and reflect about the life and times of people of the past and offers us ideas to take into our future world.  

–          Cork Heritage Open Day, 23 August, www.corkheritageopenday.ie

–          Kieran’s tours for heritage week:

·         Sunday 24 August 2014 – Eighteenth century Cork historical walking tour, Branding a City-Making a Venice of the North, with Kieran; meet at City Library, Grand Parade, 7pm (free, duration: two hours).

·         Monday 25 August 2014 – Shandon Historical Walking Tour with Kieran, meet at North Gate Bridge, 7pm (free, duration: two hours).

·         Tuesday 26 August 2014 – Blackpool Historical Walking Tour with Kieran, meet at the North Mon gates, Gerald Griffin Avenue, 7pm (free, duration: two hours).

·         Thursday 28 August 2014 – Docklands Historical Walking Tour with Kieran, meet at Kennedy Park, Victoria Road, 7pm (free, duration: two hours).

·         Saturday 30 August 2014,  Douglas Historical Walking Tour with Kieran, meet at St. Columba’s Church Car Park, Douglas, 2pm (free, duration: two hours).

Caption:

756a. Painting a future; members of Mayfield Community Arts in Bishop Lucey Park, 22 June 2012 (picture: Kieran McCarthy)