"Love put me here" is the inscription on the tenor bell of the church of St Nicholas in Cove Street, Cork. Now love has to find a new home for the entire carillon, which includes the largest bell in Cork. The tenor bell was the gift of the Rev George Webster, rector of this parish for 30 years, who lies beneath a brass tablet in a side aisle. He was preceded there by his wife Adeline who died aged 27 in 1862, from a fever contacted during her work among the poor of the parish.
George, Adeline, the commemorative bells, those silent bodies under the aisles, the tablets and monuments are all to be moved now that this church of St Nicholas has been sold and formally deconsecrated. On Sunday January 25th, public worship ceased with a Service of Thanksgiving. The choir, the ladies in blue robes with Tudor four-cornered hats, the men in white and black, enjoyed a larger congregation than usual as they led the Nunc Dimittus. It was a fervent litany of thanksgiving for the life and witness of the church, for all those who had worshipped, confessed, married, been baptised and confirmed, prayed and praised, served, preached and worked or who, being "weary and heavy laden in this place found rest unto their souls". It reminded us that the Communion of Saints stretches back in this place through many centuries.
Opened in 1723
"We go out", said the Right Rev R. A. Warke , Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, "with faith in a loving God and thankful that this church has been used mightily in its day and generation".
The present large granite building was opened in 1723 and was designed to serve the thickly-clustered houses and hovels of the district once known as Irishtown as well as the regiments quartered in Elizabeth Fort nearby. This is the territory marked by the South Gate bridge and by the fort which stands half-way up the hill. The names here reflect its earlier character: Barrack Street, the Magazine Road, Crosses Green. The fort itself retains a ramshackle dominance over the quays and alleyways whose narrow girth and ancient stone walls hint loudly at their origins.
But the Church of St Nicholas dates back even further. A church of some kind has been here since the time of St Finbarr and this small hillside is the city's Christian heartland, only yards away from the cathedral itself.
By the time of the Siege of Cork in 1690 many of the churches in the area had disappeared, and of those that remained the only ones to be retrieved from the ruins were St Maries of the Isles, the cathedral, which was rebuilt in 1735, and the church of St Nicholas, rebuilt in 1723 from a tax on coal entering the port.
Monastic history
Before the time when these institutions marked the close of Cork's monastic history and the dawn of its episcopal era, before the jail at the South Gate, or the high white walls of Elizabeth Fort, before Keysers' Quay was anything more than yet another of Cork's river shores, before the MacCarthys of Desmond agreed to deal with Henry II of England and allow the AngloNormans into the city, this enclave had been a settlement of surviving, largely assimilated, earlier invaders, the Ostmen.
These hilly lanes marked the environs of the Scandanavian town, and it was from the slopes subsequently used for the building of the several churches of St Nicholas that the last Ostman mayor of Cork - Gilbert, son of Turgerius - rallied a fleet to fend off the advancing Strongbow at Youghal in 1173. Gilbert was defeated and killed. Another eventual casualty of the time was Cormac, son of Dermot MacCarthy, King of Desmond; on the failure of his resistance to the invaders welcomed by his father, he was executed by Raymond le Gros with Dermot's connivance.
Gilbert's property was invested by the Normans and the parish grew through the following centuries. Once 4,000 of Sarsfield's men camped here while they waited to embark for France. Exiles in the other direction, Ireland's first Ursuline nuns, were brought here in 1771 by Nano Nagle, who later established her own community 50 yards or so to the east of Cove Street. Nearly 70 years later it was in Cove street also that four men, a Quaker Martin, a Unitarian Dunscombe, a Presbyterian Dowden and the Catholic Capuchun priest Theobald Mathew, gathered one night and agreed together to begin the crusade for temperance which they inaugurated the following evening at the Horse Bazaar in the adjacent Mary Street.
This is only an outline of the history that throngs around the St Nicholas's doors, where in the past few weeks prospective purchasers were shown through the chancel and vestry, the lady chapel and baptistry, the belltower and loft, even as the brass tablets were still being polished and the flowers replaced. On its last Sunday morning the sermon was preached by the curate, Rev Michael Graham: there was some symmetry in this, as it was the last occasion for Rev Graham to minister as a priest of the diocese which he leaves to take up his appointment as Rector of Drogheda and Ardee Unions.
Appropriate patronage
At the final service on Sunday afternoon the Bishop said that St Nicholas of Myra was the patron saint of children, merchants, sailors and pawnbrokers; he might have added that few saints could claim so appropriate a patronage for the city of Cork. As he spoke the late sunlight fell on the great marble monument to the first Baron Tracton, colouring it with the hues of the stained windows. On the greensward outside, the tumbled graves (these remain in the care of the Church of Ireland) testify to the fellowship of the community which, without the scarlet ranks of the soldiery which left its many initials incised in the pews, could not survive. The bells rang out for the last time from the steeple, and not even organist Angela Nicholl's jaunty rendition of the "Trumpet Voluntary" could soften the solemnity, and the finality, of the bishop's closing injunction: that this church being no longer required for the essential needs of the Diocese of Cork "all rights, immunities and privileges attached to this consecrated building be now removed".