'Cork didn't get any less beautiful. I just stopped looking': Being a tourist in your own city

Familiarity has a way of flattening wonder. This prompted Esther McCarthy to become a tourist in her own backyard

Esther McCarthy and Scott Read smile for the camera beside the elevated tree walk in Marina Park. Picture: Chani Anderson

There’s a particular type of blindness that comes with living somewhere beautiful for long enough. I have spent my whole life boring anyone who’ll listen about how lucky we are in Cork — the food, the people, the culture, the festivals, the light on the water, the sheer cheek of a coastal county that has a perfectly-sized city, magic mountains, and the Wild Atlantic Way all within an hour of each other — and yet I could count on one hand the number of times I’d actually gone looking for any of it on purpose.

So this July, in the middle of a heatwave that made the whole county look like it had been lit for an ad, I decided to be a tourist in my own backyard. Cycle the city like I’d never seen it. Eat my way through the English Market like a visitor with one day and a hollow stomach. Bond with alpacas along a sea cliff. Sleep under some of the darkest skies in Ireland. And all an hour from my own front door.

Here’s the thing that struck me almost immediately: If I rounded a corner in Lisbon or Lyon and found something like the Butter Museum sitting there, all that history plonked at the top of a winding city street, I’d be reaching for my phone, saying, “WOW! Would you look at that!” If I saw the sweep of Bantry Bay from a hillside for the first time, I’d assume I’d stumbled on somewhere impossibly remote and rare. We do this, don’t we? We fly hours to gawp at coastlines no more astonishing than our own, because familiarity has a way of flattening wonder. Cork didn’t get any less beautiful. I just stopped looking. Kavanagh’s line comes to mind: “We have tested and tasted too much lover, Through a chink too wide, there comes no wonder.”

Well, four outings, one heatwave, some family and friends for company, here’s the wonder I found through the chink of Cork city and county.

The city, by bike and by bite

I meet James Foley at St Patrick’s Quay on a Tuesday morning, my 11-year-old Scott beside me looking deeply unconvinced that cycling around his own city constitutes an adventure. James runs Beyond the Glass Adventure Tours, and he has the right pedigree for it — raised in rural Aghabullogue, a lifetime of hiking and cycling all over Ireland and further afield, and a conviction that nowhere he’s been beats home. He left his desk job because he was convinced he’d do better “beyond the glass” of his office, and he has proved himself right.

Esther McCarthy and James Foley, founder of Beyond the Glass Adventure Tours, pictured on St Patrick’s Quay before setting off to explore Cork City by bike. Picture: Chani Anderson

We cycle out through the city, me on an electric bike, Scott on his own steam, on bike lanes that mean traffic doesn’t bother us, alongside the Marina Market and onto the Marina Promenade, that lovely 1.8km stretch along the Lee that I have shamefully underused. There’s an elevated tree walkway, woodland paths, and the wonderfully named Barrington’s Folly rising up out of the greenery, because of course Cork has a folly, like.

Diners at Marina Market, Cork City

It’s an odd, octagonal little tower, and nobody can quite agree on when it went up. Some trace it back to the late 18th century, others to the early 19th. What is generally agreed is that it became the meeting place of a Regency-era drinking society called the Ballintemple Corporation, a group of local worthies who delighted in spoofing Cork Corporation’s civic ceremonies.

Their most famous stunt involved parading a stage elephant borrowed from a production of Blue Beard along the riverbank. After decades in ruins, the folly has now been restored as part of the new Marina Park.

Dog walkers nod at us. Rowers slice past on the river. We push towards Blackrock Castle and stop for a rest and a couple of photos, its turrets catching the sun over the estuary, making a perfect backdrop. Where else would you find a castle built to fend off pirates that now points telescopes at space?

Esther McCarthy, Scott Read and James Foley leave Blackrock Castle Observatory after visiting its historic turret as part of the Beyond the Glass Adventure Tours cycling experience. Picture: Chani Anderson

We follow the old railway greenway on towards Mahon: It’s flat, easy cycling with the water glinting the whole way, and not another soul in a hurry. At the green outside Páirc Uí Chaoimh, James produces two hurleys and a sliotar from his panier and himself and Scott have a puck-around with the stadium as a backdrop, in a county that treats hurling less as a sport than as a birthright, even two decades on from our last All-Ireland title, with a couple of heartbreaking near-misses along the way to keep the wound fresh. But say what you will about us, Cork people never lose the faith. 2027 is going to be our year, mark my words.

Blackrock Castle Observatory, Co. Cork

That afternoon, I drop Scott and his hurley back to Bishopstown GAA for some training and head back into the city centre for a food tour with Máire Ní Mhurchú. She’s a chef, home economics teacher, native Irish speaker, and a woman who clearly regards Cork’s food heritage as a personal calling. We start at the Butter Museum, where I learn properly, for the first time, the story of Irish butter as “yellow gold” and the old butter roads that fed a trade running back 300 years. Then into Shandon Sweets, where Tony Linehan tells us that Roy Keane just sent someone in specially yesterday for supplies of clove rocks, his sweet of choice.

The Butter Museum in Cork City

From there, we wander down Widderlings Lane, a Viking laneway I have never, in a lifetime of calling myself a proud Corkonian, actually walked. The Vikings didn’t fight the Corkonians here, Máire tells me (we were probably way sounder than the Wexford crowd), they traded and intermarried with them, and the lane still carries their names and their ghosts back to the 7th century. There’s ceramic art along the walls, some of it recently made three-dimensional so people with vision impairments can feel it with their hands, a mural for Justice and Freedom for Palestine, and a painting of Mother Jones, the Cork-born-and-raised trade unionist who ended up organising American miners and being called “the most dangerous woman in America”. All of this, 10 minutes from where I’ve parked my car a hundred times.

Esther at Shandon Bells

We stroll through the Coal Quay, Cornmarket Street on the map, and I get a flood of memories of the weekly trip to town with my grandmother, who would never skip the rummage around the stalls here. For 300 years this was the beating commercial heart of the city, an old quayside filled in and built over, and for generations it was kept alive by the Shawlies: The black-shawled women who traded fruit, veg and second-hand clothes here out of sheer necessity, holding their families together on what they could sell off a stall. There’s a statue to them now, Seamus Murphy’s Onion Seller, and their descendants still gather in the city, some of them still holding trading rights passed down through the family. I’ve walked past that statue more times than I can count without ever knowing what it meant.

We continue down Patrick Street and finish, as any sane person would, in the English Market, which even on a normal Tuesday feels like the beating heart of the city, but through a tourist’s eyes is something else entirely. Every stall is a family business. We start at Tom Durcan’s for his legendary spiced beef, detour to The Chocolate Shop for a Bailey’s and salted caramel truffle that I will be thinking about for some time, then over to the Real Olive Company and the Toons Bridge Dairy stall, run by Toby Simmonds and Jenny-Rose Clarke, who make Ireland’s first buffalo mozzarella from their own herd of around 80 Italian buffalo down in West Cork.

Real Olive Company in the English Market

The mozzarella, creamy and plump, with fresh basil and tomato, is genuinely one of the nicest things I’ve eaten all year. Last stop is K. O’Connell’s fishmongers, where Pat O’Connell famously roared laughing sharing a moment with Queen Elizabeth 11 on her historic visit, and where a giant tuna and an enormous swordfish eyeball me while I work through a tasting plate of smoked salmon, oysters, prawns and mackerel. Two hours, four stops, and I don’t think I need dinner for a week.

Alpacas above the Atlantic

A week later Scott and his friend JD, myself and my friend Fran, head for Union Hall and Seaside Alpacas, where the boys are handed the lead ropes for two alpacas, Sonny and Choco, which is short for Chocolate Cream Sprinkles, named by two small girls at the farm he came from. The lads are not impressed. There’s a whole cast of characters here: Magos, the oldest at eight, sporting a beard; Papa, the friendliest of the herd; Taco, who makes all the noise, steadied by his placid brother Paddington; Jaffa and Jasper, 11 months old and total opposites, one brave, one shy; and Stephen, born on St Stephen’s Day. There are two-week-old babies too, kept deliberately apart from visitors so they never learn to see humans as part of the herd — which, we’re told, is also why the adults only spit at each other and not at us. JD finds out that this isn’t quite guaranteed at feeding time.

Esther McCarthy hanging with an alpaca at Union Hall

We walk them out through fields and along coastal paths to a sheltered cove, Rabbit Island sitting out in the bay, the water at Trá na Oileáin so clear it barely looks real. The pace is unhurried, the boys are entirely absorbed, and somewhere around the halfway point, one of them announces he wants to smuggle an alpaca home in the car. Back at the farm, we help with feeding and get shown into the wool workshop, watching raw alpaca fibre turned into finished knitwear over tea and biscuits. It’s the kind of gentle, low-key brilliant afternoon that costs a fraction of a flight anywhere and delivers considerably more wonder per euro.

Scott with alpacas along the shore at Seaside Alpacas

The darkest skies in Ireland

The final leg of our trip is for grown-ups only. My husband and I head for Wild Hideaways, a six-lodge eco retreat tucked into the Mealagh Valley above Bantry Bay. Perched on a rewilded site that became Europe’s first DarkSky Approved lodging this year. It feels less like checking into accommodation and more like disappearing from the world for a while.

Wilde Hideaway, a six-lodge eco retreat above Bantry Bay

Our lodge has a private alfresco hot bath facing the valley and, refreshingly, a Brick device designed to disconnect from your phone rather than charge it. It turns out that setting your screen aside is a lot easier when your view is rolling hills, open sky and absolute peace. Within a couple of hours, emails, social media and the endless mental tabs of everyday life feel very far away.

There is plenty to do, if you want to. We spend time in the sauna and cold plunge, enjoy a couples’ massage in The Sanctuary and sink into a seaweed bath scented with Bere Island seaweed. There is a wonderful yoga session the following morning and the evening around the fire pit, but the standout experience is the Wild Sky Dome, where a guided cloud-gazing session finally makes me understand what mindfulness is all about. Looking up at the shifting sky, it suddenly feels fitting that the ancient Kealkill stone circle sits just up the road; people have been standing still and marvelling at the landscape around here for a very long time.

Dark skies over Wild Hideaways

As I settle into a hot seaweed bath under the stars, the valley falling away towards Bantry Bay below, it is very hard to think of anywhere I’d rather be. Dinner is a hamper of fresh local ingredients eaten by the fire pit as darkness settles over the hills. The next morning brings yoga in the dome, an early sauna, filtered coffee and a bumper breakfast hamper. By then, I have completely forgotten that Bantry is only an hour and a bit from my own kitchen table. It feels much further away than that.

Homeward bound

Four trips, one county, countless discoveries and the realisation that I’d been taking my beloved Cork for granted.

Over the course of a month, I followed Vikings through the city streets, learned how butter built fortunes, connected with alpacas, cycled riverside paths I’d barely noticed before, and soaked beneath some of the darkest skies in Europe.

I came home more tired, more tanned, and considerably more smug about where I live than when I started.

It turns out adventure wasn’t hiding on the far side of an airport departure gate. It was right here all along. I just needed to open my eyes, and stop driving past it.

Escape Notes

To plan your own Cork adventure, see Visit Cork and Pure Cork for information, events and news.

• visitcorkcity.com
• purecork.ie

Beyond The Glass offers Cork City cycle tours, guided day hikes and team building events.

• beyondtheglass.ie

Active Days with Máire Ní Mhurchú offers A Slice of Cork food tours, and many other activities.

• activitydays.ie

Wild Hideaways offers adults-only luxury lodges in West Cork.

• wildhideways.ie

Seaside Alpacas

• seasidealpacas.com

Esther was a guest of Pure Cork