Kinsale used to be as far as you could go. Then America was discovered, as ROSITA BOLANDlearns
AT THIS TIME of the year Don and Barry’s Historic Stroll departs twice a day, at 9.15am and 11.15am, from the tourist office in Kinsale, Co Cork. You get only one of them at a time, though. It’s Barry Moloney, not Don Herlihy, who turns up to lead our 11.15am group one recent wet morning.
Twenty-two of us set off with the engaging Barry on our walking tour. The problem is that it’s pouring, and in addition to the fact there is only one Barry, and 22 tourists, there are 18 umbrellas. This makes him hard to see and hear.
I am the only Irish person on the tour. This may be why Barry eyes me self-consciously every time he makes a joke about how much the Irish like to drink and fight. There are quite a few of those jokes.
We stop at the Vivienne Roche sculpture, and Barry takes out a map, points to the harbour and canters through the bloody history of Charles Fort and the Battle of Kinsale, in 1601. It all goes over my head like the seagulls whirling above. There are so many dates and so many battles and so many umbrellas.
Things liven up when we move inland and Barry shows us a stone stump near Market Place. That was where the quayside used to be. Boats were once tied up here, where we now stand, looking at shops and traffic. I eye the piece of stone with new respect and interest, and all at once the boundaries of old Kinsale come vividly alive.
Is anyone staying at the waterfront Trident Hotel? A couple of hands emerge from under umbrellas like doves flying out from the ark. Have they noticed the address? It is, Barry tells us, World’s End, so called because, when the place was named, America was still undiscovered and Kinsale was the end of the known world. Later, I pass the hotel. It indeed proclaims to be at World’s End. I have knowingly walked past the end of the world.
We stand outside the lovely museum building, which Barry tells us was previously the courthouse, and which was the location for the inquest into the sinking of the Lusitania, in 1915, off the nearby Old Head of Kinsale.
Meanwhile, I am admiring the stamina of the tourists. The rain is now torrential, but not a person drops out, and you don’t even have to pay your €6 until the end, so people could easily bale at this point, but none does. That’s definitely a tribute to Barry – who, by the way, has no umbrella himself.
Kinsale once had a giant, Patrick Cotter, born in 1760, and we are taken to Chairman’s Lane to see where he is supposed to have lived. The Giant’s Cottage is a sweet, unlikely home for a man who measured 8ft 3in. He was, Barry says, a bricklayer. Or was it a plasterer? I can’t remember. The main point of the story is to tell us that the giant didn’t need to spend any money on a ladder, as he could reach everything he needed to merely by standing up.
Cotter was discovered by a showman and went to England. Thereafter he was rarely seen in public, because his appeal was his novelty, and the showman did not want punters to see him for free. What are reputed to be his cutlery and one of his shoes are on display in the museum. The giant is buried in Bristol. Which is why he’s known as the Bristol Giant there, but he’s really the Kinsale Giant.
Barry draws our attention to the name of the narrow, steep street. Chairman’s Lane is so called because when the captains of ships came into port, and tied up at the quayside, they were carried up this very street in a sedan chair. Well, some kind of a chair.
At the top of the street is Desmond Castle, which was formerly a custom house. Here
the captains got tipped out of their chairs and had to pay their taxes. They walked back to their ships. I wonder how many of them went back to their ships with stories of sighting a giant.
Barry, I note at the end of the tour, get lots of tips. He deserves them.
historicstrollkinsale.com
