Digging into the past of rich history

NOTHING stands still: not time, not the ground we stand on, and certainly not a city.

One of the two sites proposed for an events and concert centre in Cork could be a place where a happening city hub of the future revisits its equivalent of the recent past of boozing, night-clubbing and pill-popping (think Sir Henry’s nightclub across the road), as well as the more distant, medieval, primitive ‘club to the head’ past.

The suddenly redundant Beamish and Crawford brewing plant in the city’s South Main Street & stands on a site steeped in history; from ancient estuarine marsh to St FinBarre’s arrival, and from the Vikings to the Normans and the rest of us latter-day arrivals. Now, after a 21st century brewery amalgamation, it’s back to Dutch parental control via Heineken. It’s a racing certainty that the old, founding, Hiberno-Norse city walls run under a goodly portion of this profile city site of continuing promise, by the venerable South Gate Bridge. Previous examinations, when the site was still an active brewery, found evidence of the old walls, and former city archaeologist Maurice Hurley has found clear signs of medieval settlement stratigraphy.