50 Best Sights in County Cork, Ireland

Snack on a homemade burger while stocking up on chutneys, charcuterie, farmhouse cheeses, salads, and organic veggies and fruit at this cute piazza market.

It was in the village of Woodfield, 9 km (6 miles) west of Timoleague, that Michael Collins (1890–1922) had his last drink before he was shot in an ambush. The enthusiastic guide at this cottage-museum, signposted off the R600 east of Clonakilty, offers a lively introduction to the controversial hero of Irish independence, using slides, large photos, and film clips. Outside is a reconstruction of the ambush site, complete with Collins's armored Rolls-Royce and a Crossley tender. Directions to other Collins sites in the area are available, as are guided tours (prebooking essential mid-September to mid-June).

Located in one of Ireland's few planned squares---an area where Collins lived as a boy---this museum maps the struggle for Irish independence from early days until 1922. History comes alive through interactive displays, audiovisuals, information boards, and artifacts. Although Collins, the famous statesman and politician, is the focus here, other periods---such as the rebellion of 1798---are also included. 

Nano Nagle (1718--84) founded the Presentation order of nuns, and was a pioneer in the education of the poor. The convent that was her Cork headquarters has been transformed into a delightful heritage center and provides a welcome oasis of calm in the city center. Visit her tomb, with its water fountain, graveyard, and garden before discovering the ornate Victorian Gothic Revival chapel ("The Goldie Chapel"), a popular new venue for readings and other events. The oldest buildings on-site, dating from the early 18th century, including Miss Nagle's parlor, can be visited only on guided tours, which depart daily at 11 am and 3 pm.

More than 24 species of whale and dolphin have been spotted off the coast of West Cork. Trips to see at least some of them last three to four hours, with commentary on other local bird and wildlife, and leave from the harbor at Baltimore, about 13 km (8 miles) southwest of Skibbereen. Reservations are recommended in peak season.

Set on the banks of the River Lee with a redbrick chimney that towers over the network of handsome sandstone Victorian buildings that house 100-year-old engine rooms, boilers, and steam centers, this fascinating experience takes you behind the mechanics that generated three centuries of local hydraulic innovation. With interactive exhibitions and informative tours, visitors explore Cork's industrial heritage, and get some insight into the science behind water supply and the challenges facing the environment today. Tours are held every 30 minutes.

From Easter to September, this foodie's Sunday market showcases superb products from local bakers, fish smokers, cheese makers, and Gubbeen smoked pork products, all sold by their makers.

Run by the Kilkenny Shop, the spacious gallery and showroom (with scrumptious home baking in the café) is in the village center. On display are high-end Irish-made crafts including Newbridge silverware, Orla Kiely handbags, and potter Louis Mulcahy's huge bowls and lamps, as well as Irish-made clothing, woolen goods, Irish linen, and jewelry. Several artists and craft makers have studios in the basement, where their work is also for sale.

Shanagarry's most famous Quaker native son was none other than William Penn (1644–1718), the founder of the Pennsylvania colony, who grew up in Shanagarry House, still a private residence in the center of the village. The house's most famous tenant since William Penn was Marlon Brando, who stayed here in the summer of 1995 while filming Divine Rapture in nearby Ballycotton.

Jutting into the ocean like a bony, accusatory finger, this 28-km-long (17-mile-long) peninsula is 4 km (2½ miles) at its widest and is the place to go way off-grid in West Cork because of its restricted access on two minor roads. With a network of 20 looped trails, the most famous being the 88-km (54½-mile) Sheep's Head Way, the ocean is never more than a short hike away. Views of the neighboring peninsulas of Mizen and Beara unfold further into Sheep's Head, along with hairpin bends, cliff-side walks, castles, deep valleys, blowholes, and wide-open bays. A small shrine dedicated to the 329 lost souls aboard an ill-fated Air India aircraft back in 1985 provides a somber respite along the way. At the southerly tip is Bernie's Cupán Tae, a stalwart of Irish hospitality for decades, offering freshly baked scones and sandwiches that taste all the better after a hike in the fresh sea air.

A thoughtful renovation of a stone gasworks building has created an attractive, architecturally appropriate home for the Skibbereen Heritage Centre. An elaborate audiovisual exhibit on the Great Famine presents dramatized firsthand accounts of what it was like to live in this community when it was hit hard by hunger. Other attractions include displays on area marine life, walking tours, access to local census information, and a varying schedule of special programs.

The inn looks over the town and harbor from a hairpin bend on the road to Charles Fort. Inside, sawdust-covered floors and a big open fireplace make this onetime fishermen's bar a cozy spot in winter. In summer you can take a pint to the veranda and watch the world go by on land and sea.

The church's pepper-pot steeple, which has a four-sided clock and is topped with a golden, salmon-shape weather vane, is visible from throughout the city and is the chief reason why St. Anne's is so frequently visited. The Bells of Shandon were immortalized in an atrocious, but popular, 19th-century ballad of that name. Your reward for climbing the 120-foot-tall tower is the chance to ring the bells out over Cork, with the assistance of sheet tune cards---and, of course, the magnificent views over the city. The famous clock tower with its red sandstone and white ashlar finish is a city landmark and supposedly the inspiration for the county's renowned red-and-white sport's colors, while the clock's notoriously unreliable timekeeping gained it the nickname of the "Four Faced Liar." Beside the church, Firkin Crane, Cork's 18th-century butter market, houses two small performance spaces.

The best view of Cobh, well worth the uphill stroll, is from St. Colman's Cathedral, an exuberant neo-Gothic granite church designed by the eminent British architect E. W. Pugin in 1869, and completed in 1919. Inside, granite niches portray scenes of the Roman Catholic Church's history in Ireland, beginning with the arrival of St. Patrick. The row of colorful 'Deck of Cards' Houses that lead the way up the hill add a unique backdrop to the cathedral. 

On the site that was the entrance to medieval Cork, this compact, three-spire Gothic cathedral, which was completed in 1879, belongs to the Church of Ireland and houses a 3,000-pipe organ. According to tradition, St. Fin Barre established a monastery on this site around AD 650 and is credited with being the founder of Cork. The cathedral was designed by William Burges, one of the greatest of the Victorian art--architects, and everything here, including the church fittings, furnishings, mosaics, ironwork, and stained glass, shows his distinctive "Burgesian Gothic" hand.

Once the bread and butter of Cork City's economy, the creamy product from the Rebel County's lush countryside and beyond---butter---dominated the world market with distribution in every corner of the former British Empire. Today, in a quirky Shandon neighborhood near St. Anne's Church on a square that once housed the Butter Market and follows the contours of the large circular Firkin Crane building (where casks were once weighed), visitors can trace that history and discover the merchant's artifacts and tools in this pint-sized museum.

Many of the people who left Ireland on immigrant ships for the New World departed from Cobh, which was formerly known as Queenstown. The exhibit, in the old Cobh train station, re-creates the experience of the 2½ million emigrants who left from here between 1848 and 1960. It also tells the stories of great transatlantic liners, including the ill-fated Titanic, whose last port of call was Cobh, and the Lusitania.

Cobh was the last port of call for the ocean liner Titanic. At 1:30 pm on April 11, 1912, tenders carried 123 passengers out to the ship from the offices of the White Star Line. These offices have now been converted into an interactive exhibition (cinema, holographs, touch-screen displays), allowing visitors to follow, literally, in the footsteps of the passengers as they embarked on the fateful voyage. Visitors assume the identity of one passenger and discover if that passenger survived at the end of the tour.

A mid-13th-century Franciscan abbey at the water's edge is Timoleague's most striking monument. The abbey was built before the estuary silted up, and its main business was the importing of wine from Spain. A tower and walls with Gothic-arch windows still stand, and you can trace the ground plan of the old friary—chapel, refectory, cloisters, and the extensive wine cellar. The English sacked the abbey in 1642, but like many other ruins of its kind it was used as a burial place until the late 20th century, hence the modern gravestones.

Walk around the back to find the entrance gate. The view of the sea framed by the structure's ruined Gothic windows is a don't-miss photo op.

The Doric-porticoed gates of UCC stand about 2 km (1 mile) from the city center. The college, which has a student body of roughly 20,000, is a constituent of the National University of Ireland. The main quadrangle is a fine example of 19th-century university architecture in the Tudor-Gothic style, reminiscent of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Several ancient ogham stones are on display in the North Quadrangle (near the visitor center), and the renovated Crawford Observatory's 1860 telescope can be visited. The Honan Collegiate Chapel, east of the quadrangle, was built in 1916 and modeled on the 12th-century Hiberno-Romanesque style, best exemplified by the remains of Cormac's Chapel at Cashel. The UCC chapel's stained-glass windows, as well as its collection of art and crafts, altar furnishings, and textiles in the Celtic Revival style, are noteworthy. Three large, modern buildings have been successfully integrated with the old, including the Boole Library, named for mathematician George Boole (1815–64), who was a professor at the college, and whose bicentenary was celebrated in 2015. Both indoors and out the campus is enhanced by works of contemporary Irish art. The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, a striking new building adjacent to the college's entrance gates, displays works from the college's outstanding collection and hosts cutting-edge contemporary-art exhibitions.