Cobh and Cork

More Oirish factoids - the big inlet next to Cork is the second deepest natural harbour in the world. We are staring at it right now, from Cobh's dockside motorhome parking area. A silvery expanse fills our windscreen, every so often big boats thrum past - chunky container ships, bulk carriers, the ferry to Roscoff, an Irish frigate berthing at the naval base opposite. 

It's a great place to stay, a short walk from Cobh railway station which has an half-hourly service into Cork, and next to a very pleasant esplanade that takes you straight to Cobh town centre. 

The municipality has made a real effort, next to us there is an adventure playground and a brand new, well equipped outdoor gym that no-one uses. The waterside walk into town is lined with flower beds and shrubs, but also strawberry tubs, miniature apple trees, and raspberry and gooseberry bushes. These are well tended and the whole area, like public spaces in Ireland generally, is pristine and litter free. Here It feels like people care about the locale, back home so many places are litter strewn and unkempt.

We decided to walk into town. Cobh houses the cruise terminal for Cork and southwest lreland. The town has developed a Titanic themed tourist industry, as the port then known as 'Queenstown', was the doomed liner's last port of call before failing to arrive in Halifax, Nova Scotia. There's a certain irony in herding cruise ship victims ashore to entertain them with a multi-media exhibition of the world's most celebrated passenger ship disaster. Happily the place was not thronged with bewildered septuagenarians called Hilda and Brian, and the quayside was empty apart from a couple of tugs, on standby probably for the arrival of some TUI or MSC behemoth.

Our ambitions in Cobh were modest, find a bar that would serve us a couple of glasses of 'the black stuff' (more challenging would be to find one that couldn't!) Strictly speaking we should have chosen Murphy 's as it's brewed down the road in Cork, but we settled for Guinness from the aptly named 'Kelly's Bar'.

Gill posed a tricky question, "When was the last time we drank Guinness?" It must be more than twenty years we decided. In fairness, in our twenties we probably downed more than enough of the stuff to last a lifetime. It was a go to beverage in our student days (well, Gill was a student, I was a drop-out!). Maybe we developed our liking for it when we were regulars at 'The Bottles' - a favourite student haunt. When we moved from Northumberland to Manchester our local Irish pub - 'The Clarence' in Rusholme - had live traditional music on a Friday night. It would have been deemed culturally inappropriate not to have downed the 'black stuff' by the gallon before joining in the heartfelt rendition of 'O Danny Boy' that signalled closing time. A biscuit tin was always passed around, people put in a quid or so 'for the players'. I never did work out if the Irish guy next to me was simply winding me up when he claimed, "not a penny of it goes to the fiddler, it's all for the Provos!"

Anyway, how would Guinness taste after a gap of two or three decades? Different, thinner, and the flavours flatter and less complex than I expected. I don't think the drink itself will have changed that much, but our beer drinking habits have. We drink less, but our preferred beers - Leffe, Goudale or craft beer IPAs are 2.5% stronger than draught stout. They have more body and much more complex 'notes'. Maybe Murphy's is the way to go we wondered - another time.

We headed to Cobh town centre. It is built on the slopes above the harbour, somewhat dominated by the grey, enormous bulk of St. Colman's Cathedral, a ghastly late Victorian neo-Gothic monstrosity designed by Pugin and Ashlin.

Aside from this, with its brightly coloured Georgian terraces stepped up the above the waterfront Cobh looks rather lovely, particularly when viewed by the small park by the water's edge.

Next day we caught the train into Cork, it takes 35 minutes and the return fare is inexpensive at €6.90. Don't be tempted to fare dodge, there were three inspectors on the train ( 'Revenue Assurance' written in bold letters on the back of their hi-viz). Each one checked our tickets and still we had to go through electronic barriers when we arrived at Cork station. 

We had no particular plan other than do a pants and socks shop at M&S then have lunch at Cork's famous produce market. The English Market got its name because it was founded in 1788 by the municipal authorities who at that time were English speaking protestants. 

It was interesting to compare the place with the grand municipal markets we know in Spain. The English Market is similar both in terms of its size and the range of the produce on offer. 

The difference is in the mix. In Spain fruit, vegetables and herbs predominate, more cured meat than butchery, and quite often a big fish market occupies the whole basement. In Cork the opposite pertains, essentially it is a meat market, there are a couple of vegetables stalls, two fishmongers, two cheesemongers and quite a few delicatessens and places selling cheffy type condiments. 

The contrast reflects the difference between the cuisines of the north and south, not least in the way specialist international products are available in the English Market, but in Spain things like couscous or risotto rice would be a rare find in a municipal market. 

One thing that has surprised us about Ireland is, aside from a few small inshore boats, it does not appear to have much of a fishing industry. Its cuisine looks more to the land than the sea, which is odd given such a long Atlantic seaboard. 

We had lunch in the Farmgate Café which occupies most of the wrought iron gallery that overlooks the main market. It specialises in Irish classics. 

We chose the lamb stew which came with a baked potato. The stew was excellent but the baked potato was a bit too floury for my taste and overcooked. 

We headed out onto Grand Parade, one of Cork's main thoroughfares. We needed to find somewhere that might serve us a decent macchiato. This proved trickier than we anticipated, given Cork's reputation as a cool, vibrant city. Things were not looking good - when TripAdvisor lists a chain - Café Gusto - as the 4th best café in the city, then in all likelihood disappointment is looming. We ended up at a place down a side street called Café Suma.

 The cake we shared was unremarkable and the coffees too strong to achieve that perfect balance of lusciousness with a bitter edge you get from a macchiato that truly hits the spot. Mounting disappointment prompted an outbreak of sentimentality - I recalled our macchiato apotheosis, "Remember the ones we had in that gelateria in Noto, just along the street from the cathedral... " It's a slippery slope to seek reassurance from the past, but sometimes needs must; few things are more guaranteed to make Gill grumpy than an unbalanced macchiato.

The centre of Cork feels familiarish, the same but different. The shopping streets resemble most medium sized cities in the British Isles, one vista momentarily reminded me of Leicester!

I don't know who decided to forest the pedestrian areas with diagonally leaning street lights. They looked like a scaled-up version of a dreadful IKEA lampstand. They achieve the effect of not being able to see the wood for the trees, but only using street furniture.

Though the style of the buildings are more or less indistinguishable from what you would find in an similar sized English city, there are some differences. In particular Cork seems to have escaped the wholesale re-development that happened in most UK city centres in the 1970s - Eldon Square in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Arndale Centre in Manchester. For Cork it seems this was a close run thing. The English Market website mentions there were two proposals in the 1970s and 1980s to bulldoze the old market and replace it with a shopping mall.

Of course some urban renewal in the UK was the result of wartime damage, which I assumed Cork would have escaped entirely. However, this is not quite the case. In 1920, during the war of independence a contingent of British soldiers abetted by Black and Tan reservists ran amok in Cork and torched many buildings in the city centre. 

Most of the big department stores on Grand Parade and St Patrick's Street are Edwardian, however the former Debenham's building and a few smaller shops look distinctly Art Deco, maybe these 1930s redevelopments were the result of rebuilding after the conflagration.

The county and city of Cork were flashpoints during Ireland's final war of independence and the civil war which followed it. So it comes as no surprise that at the far end of Grand Parade, overlooking the river Lee, is a national monument to the city's fallen in various uprisings against British rule from 1798 to the 1920s. 

From an Irish perspective I imagine it remains work in progress. With Sinn Féin in ascendancy in both the Republic and Northern Ireland - the preferred choice of most younger voters on both sides of the border - it does seem there is an unstoppable trajectory towards a united Ireland, though maybe not in my lifetime.

We decided to head back to the station. Cork is an interesting city, not quite as architecturally alluring as I anticipated, but fascinating, partly because of its history but also because it feels vibrant and vivacious. Judging by the leaflets we picked up and posters advertising events just been and a summer full of forthcoming ones, then you would never go short of something interesting to do here. A French New Wave film festival finished a couple of weeks ago, Cork poetry festival is happening right now (I received a complementary pamphlet of Polish Irish verse with my lamb stew), next week is the city's LGBT extravaganza. So, there we have it, a day in Cork, to summarise,vibrant place, strange lamp-posts.