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Cork City Gaol

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Aaron Loukonen
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5 out of 5
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2
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Cork City Gaol

  • December 4, 2002
  • Rated 5 of 5 by eros from Cork, Ireland, Ireland
To the west of here is an area known as Sunday's Well, and Cork City Gaol (daily: March – October 9:30am – 6pm; November – February 10am – 5pm; £3.50/€4.44). It's a good thirty minutes walk from the city centre, up the hill from North Mall. A lively taped tour takes you through the prison, focusing on social history in a way that is both engaging and enlightening. It's occasionally threaded with characters of national importance, all vividly brought to life by a dramatic audiovisual finale.

The gaol also houses the Radio Museum Experience (same times; £3.50/€4.44, combined ticket £6/€7.62), which uses similarly engaging techniques to convey the tremendous importance of the development of the wireless. When an audiovisual character in role as Marconi begins with a passionate "what is jolly about science is this: it encourages one to go on dreaming...to think [the] way to the truth of things" he takes you with him all the way.

The museum also has a large collection of early radios, a wealth of popular archival recordings, and a strangely affectionate and evocative reconstruction of the first radio station in Cork.

There's a pleasant walk from here to Fitzgerald Park: turn right as you leave the prison, left, right, and then left down a flight of steps and over the Shaky Bridge.

From journal Cork an Emerald Paradise

Cork Gaol (Jail)

  • April 17, 2002
  • Rated 4 of 5 by Aaron Loukonen from Greeley, Colorado
Cork Gaol (Jail)

One of the excellent sites in Cork that is a must-see for just about anyone is Cork Gaol, or Jail. This is a very fascinating place, a very historic one. It was built in the beginning of the 1800's, to replace what evidently was a terrible hole of a prison. It was beautifully designed, like a cross except with two sidebars. Inside they have restored several of the cells, which you can look into. The inmates were kept almost entirely in solitude and silence, which drove some of them crazy. The cells were tiny, maybe ten feet by five feet, and must have been absolute torture to stay in for months or years at a time. Obviously, that really is the purpose of a prison, to be a deterent, but most of the inmates in that time were only petty thieves that were struggling to survive, and stealing a loaf of bread and receiving six months in that place seemed to be astonishingly cruel. Still, it was fascinating to see the kind of prison that existed in the 1800's through the 1920's. It was a different style, obviously, much less humanitarian than today's style. There is an audiotape that people can carry around and listen to a narrative of each section, which is very interesting and also quite profound. It describes the stories of a lot of people down on their luck who ended up getting the shaft. There is also a video display, which I found to be tedious and fairly lame. The cells and the tape are definitely the best parts of the experience. That, and knowing that you are walking under an area where they had built gallows to hang those who ended up receiving death sentences. Somehow that has an impact on the mind. The prison really is very intersting, though, and a good way to spend a morning.

From journal Cork County

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