Walk through from the 1862 Princes Street entrance to the Grand Parade

Find the cast-iron fountain at the centre of the market

Buy tripe and drisheen, the dish Cork still eats

Buy fish from the stalls that supply the city's restaurants

There has been a market on this site in the middle of Cork since 1788, when it opened as a meat shambles; the present buildings are mid-19th century, with the ornamental Princes Street entrance built in 1862, and it runs through to the Grand Parade round a cast-iron fountain. It was badly damaged by fire in 1980, rebuilt to an award-winning conservation design, and burned again, less badly, in 1986. It is still best known for its fish and its butchers, supplies many of the city's restaurants, and is where Cork buys tripe and drisheen. Queen Elizabeth II came in 2011 and was served by the fishmonger Pat O'Connell.

The English Market: Cork's Covered Market Since 1788

Cork city

Four nights across Cork, from the English Market in the city to Midleton and Ballymaloe in the east, then west to Clonakilty black pudding and Toons Bridge buffalo mozzarella.

Cork: The Food County

Blarney and Cork

Cork (Ringaskiddy)

Ten nights in a loop from Cork: Kinsale and Baltimore on the West Cork coast, Garnish Island at Glengarriff, Killarney's lakes, three nights in Dingle with the Blaskets, then Blarney and the English Market.

West Cork and Kerry from Cork

Find Geraldine Creedon's bronze at Rory Gallagher Place — guitar-shaped on one side, with lyrics from Jinx cast into the other; unveiled at the Jazz Festival in 1997

Find the marker at 27 MacCurtain Street, where he lived above what was then the Modern Bar — the address on his Cavern Club membership card

Find the trail marker on Merchant's Quay where Crowley's Music Centre stood until 2013 — in August 1963 he paid £100 there for the 1961 Stratocaster

Have a drink in the Long Valley on Winthrop Street, open since 1842 and still run by the Moynihans, with the back bar much as it was

Visit the Rory Gallagher Music Library at Cork City Library and find the signed 50th-anniversary Stratocaster in its case

In August 1963, a 15-year-old from MacCurtain Street paid £100 for a second-hand 1961 Fender Stratocaster at Crowley's Music Centre on Merchant's Quay. That guitar — worn to bare wood from 30 years of constant playing — never left Rory Gallagher's hands. Cork City Council named a city-centre plaza after him in 1997 and in June 2025 formally launched the Stompin' Ground walking trail, with stops marking every address in his early life.

Rory Gallagher: The Stompin' Ground

Climb the keep of 1446 to the battlements at the top

Lie back and kiss the Blarney Stone, hanging upside down over the drop

Find the Druid's Circle, the Witch's Cave and the Wishing Steps in the gardens

Walk down to the lake and see Blarney House, built in 1874

The keep at Blarney, eight kilometres from Cork city, was built by the MacCarthys of Muskerry and dates from 1446, when Cormac Láidir MacCarthy rebuilt it after an earlier castle was destroyed. The Blarney Stone, a block of Carboniferous limestone set into the tower that year, sits among the machicolations at the top, and to kiss it — which is said to give the gift of the gab — you lie back and hang upside down over the drop. Around the castle are extensive gardens with rock formations given fanciful names, the Druid's Circle, the Witch's Cave and the Wishing Steps, and Blarney House, the Colthursts' Scottish baronial mansion of 1874, looks over the lake.

Blarney Castle: Hanging Upside Down for the Gift of the Gab

Take the ferry from Cobh to Spike Island, the fortress island in Cork Harbour, once a 7th-century monastery and later a convict depot known as Ireland's Alcatraz

Tour the Fort Mitchel prison on Spike Island, the star fort whose cells held the convicts

Visit the Titanic Experience Cobh in the old White Star Line ticket office, from which 123 passengers boarded Titanic at Queenstown in April 1912

Go into St Colman's Cathedral in Cobh and hear its carillon, Ireland's only one, with 49 bells

Cycle Great Island, the island Cobh is on, on the road over the causeway to Fota Island and Fota House and Arboretum

Cork Harbour is one of the largest natural harbours in the world and the history is stacked up around it. Spike Island began as a 7th-century monastery and became a convict depot so notorious it got called Ireland's Alcatraz; you tour the cells of the star fort begun in 1790 and rebuilt far larger from 1804, renamed Fort Mitchel in 1938. Back in Cobh, the Titanic Experience occupies the actual White Star Line ticket office where 123 passengers boarded the ship at Queenstown in April 1912, and St Colman's above the town has Ireland's only carillon, 49 bells, the largest in these islands. The causeway takes you on to Fota.

Cobh, Spike Island and Great Island by Bike

Tour the Old Midleton Distillery, now the Jameson Experience

Find the 31,618-gallon pot still, the largest ever built

See the iron water wheel of 1852 still turning

Find out how three rival distillers became Irish Distillers in 1966

The Old Midleton Distillery began as a woollen mill in 1796, was bought by the government in 1803 during the Napoleonic Wars and turned into a barracks, and became a distillery in 1825. The Murphys installed a pot still of 31,618 gallons, so big it had to be assembled on site with the building put up around it, and it is still the largest pot still ever built. An iron water wheel of 1852 still turns there. The old distillery closed in 1975, when a new one was built beside it for Irish Distillers, the merger of Jameson, Powers and Cork Distilleries, and the old buildings are now the Jameson Experience.

Midleton: The Largest Pot Still Ever Built

Walk the ramparts of Charles Fort, the bastion fort built between 1677 and 1682

Find out why the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 ended the Nine Years' War

Find Desmond Castle, the French Prison, in the town, and read its story from the street

Drive or cycle out to the Old Head and look out to where the Lusitania went down

Eat in one of the harbour restaurants of Kinsale

In 1601 a Spanish army landed at Kinsale to join Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell, and the battle outside the town ended the Nine Years' War. The harbour is guarded by two forts: James Fort, a 17th-century pentagonal bastion fort on the Castlepark peninsula, and Charles Fort, a star fort of 1677 at Summercove, partly restored. In town stands Desmond Castle of about 1500, known as the French Prison. Out at the Old Head of Kinsale, 11 nautical miles offshore, the U-20 torpedoed the Lusitania on 7 May 1915 and she sank in about eighteen minutes.

Kinsale: Charles Fort, the Old Head and the Lusitania

Find a Sunday score on a country road in west Cork and walk the course with the crowd

Watch a thrower loft the bowl across a corner, and see how the next shot is set up straight

Hold a 28-ounce iron bowl and work out how far you could throw it

Learn how the scoring works — fewest throws over the set course wins

Road bowling — ból an bhóthair, or bullets — is played almost nowhere but Cork and Armagh. Two players take turns hurling a solid iron ball of 28 ounces along a set course of public road, and whoever covers the distance in fewest throws wins. The skill is in the loft — throwing the bowl through the air across a corner instead of letting it run — and in opening the corner, putting it down so the camber leaves the next shot straight rather than stopping in the ditch. Crowds walk the course with the players, bets are laid on individual throws, and cars wait.

Road Bowling: Throwing an Iron Ball Down a Country Road

Start at the national park visitor centre in Ballycroy

Walk out onto the blanket bog on the park's trails

Come back on a clear moonless night and look for the Milky Way

Find out what it takes to earn Gold Tier as a dark sky park

Wild Nephin National Park takes in much of the Nephin Beg mountains and some 150 square kilometres of Atlantic blanket bog, one of the largest expanses of peatland in Europe; it was set up as Ballycroy National Park in 1998 and enlarged and renamed in 2018, and it includes the most remote point of land on the Irish mainland. It is also the Mayo Dark Sky Park, Ireland's first International Dark Sky Park, given Gold Tier in May 2016 — the highest grade there is. The visitor centre, opened in 2009, looks out over the Atlantic from Ballycroy village.

Wild Nephin: Ireland's First Dark Sky Park

Stand back from the rope at Poulnabrone and look at the thin capstone, tilted as it was built rather than by erosion

Find the fossils in the limestone pavement around the dolmen, from the tropical sea that laid this rock down about 350 million years ago

Read the excavation board: about 33 people were buried here, with stone tools, quartz and bone jewellery and pottery

Come back after dark: there is no lighting at the car park, and the dolmen stands against the stars

Poulnabrone — usually given as the hole of the sorrows, though the name more likely comes from bró, a quernstone — stands alone in the Burren: two portal stones and a backstone carrying a thin, angled capstone, on a low mound in a flat karst limestone landscape that was a warm shallow sea some 350 million years ago. Excavated in 1986 and again in 1988, the tomb held the remains of about 33 people, adults and children, along with stone tools, quartz and bone jewellery and pottery; the burials date from the Neolithic, with a much later Bronze Age burial in the portico.