Cork's history is written in defiance: a monastery on a marsh, a walled city stormed in 1690, a star fort torn down by its own citizens, and a centre burned by Crown forces in 1920. Three days trace the Rebel City from stone to memory.
William Burges's 1879 French Gothic cathedral stands where St Fin Barre founded his monastery around 606 AD — the origin point of Cork itself. Inside are 1,260 carved figures, mosaic floors and the golden Resurrection Angel.
The square bell tower is all that survives of a 14th-century Augustinian friary and is the oldest standing structure in Cork. In 1690 the Duke of Marlborough mounted a siege battery here to shell the walled city into surrender.
A star-shaped artillery fort raised in 1601 to hold Cork for the Crown, pulled down by citizens in 1603 and rebuilt in stone. Later a convict depot for transportation to Australia, then a Garda station until 2013. Ramparts open for a full circuit.
A excavated stretch of Cork's medieval town wall stands here beside an 18th-century arch salvaged from the Corn Market. The park sits on reclaimed marsh channel, showing exactly how narrow the walled island city once was.
Opened in 1824 as a castellated county prison, it held debtors, food rioters and republican women prisoners. Restored cells with figures reconstruct the 1820s regime, and the governor's house became broadcaster 6CK's studio in 1927.
Unveiled in 1906, this limestone Gothic canopy commemorates the United Irishmen of 1798 and the Fenians of 1867. Statues of Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, Michael Dwyer and O'Neill Crowley stand beneath an armed figure of Erin.
Free museum tracing Cork from Bronze Age goldwork and Viking-era finds to the revolutionary decade, holding the uniform and personal items of Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920.
On 11 December 1920 Crown forces burned the city centre and gutted the old City Hall. The replacement Portland-stone building, funded by the British government as reparation, opened in 1936 and floodlights the Lee at night.
Walled convent gardens where Nano Nagle ran illegal Catholic schools for the poor from the 1750s, in open defiance of the Penal Laws. Her grave, the 18th-century schoolhouse and an exhibition on the Presentation Sisters sit on one site.
Shandon's Butter Exchange graded and shipped Cork butter to the Caribbean, India and Australia, making this the largest butter market in the world by the 1880s. Exhibits include a keg of bog butter over a thousand years old. Entry €5.
Set in the Victorian railway station where roughly 2.5 million people left Ireland forever, covering famine coffin ships, convict transports to Australia, the Lusitania sinking of 1915 and Cobh's role as the Titanic's final port of call.
Built over 47 years from 1868 with money sent home by emigrants, the cathedral carries a 49-bell carillon, the largest in Ireland. Below it, the White Star pier is where 123 passengers tendered out to the Titanic on 11 April 1912.