Lord Mayor of Cork Cllr Kieran McCarthy continues his series of summer historical walking tours. He will conduct a walk across the area of Tramore Valley Park, formerly the Black Ash on Saturday afternoon, 29 July. The meeting point is the Halfmoon Lane gate, 2pm. The tour is free with a duration of 90 minutes. There is no booking required.

The Tramore Valley Park tour will explore the development of the area from being a swamp through to being a landfill and then onto being an artificial mound to enable the development of a park.

Lord Mayor Cllr McCarthy noted: “Cork’s Tramore Valley Park is an exciting park addition by Cork City Council. What is also great is the rich historical archive of documents and maps, which reveal not only historical development of the immediate area but also the surrounds of the southern suburbs.

“Historically William Petty’s 1655 map of the city and its environs marks the site of Tramore Valley Park as Spittal Lands, a reference to the original local environment and the backing up of the Trabeg and Tramore tributary rivers as they enter the Douglas River channel. We are lucky that there is also really interesting perspectives on the area recorded through the ages, which have been great to research”.

“Walking across the park, one can feel the tension in its sense of place, a place haunted and engineered by its past and teeming with ideas about its future. Of course, there are green spaces scattered across the city but none with the same scale of development and story as the 160 acre site off Kinsale Road. This is a site where the city’s environment has also been a regular topic of debate across local newspapers and in the city’s council political chamber”, concluded Lord Mayor, Cllr McCarthy.