St. Anne's Church
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.
