Discover Cobh

The Cove of Cork, Queenstown, Cobh

Cobh sits on the south shore of Great Island in Cork Harbour, one of the largest natural harbours in the world. It was a small fishing settlement called the Cove of Cork until the Napoleonic wars turned the harbour into a naval anchorage, and it grew through the nineteenth century into the great transatlantic departure port of the south of Ireland. It was renamed Queenstown in 1849 after a visit by Queen Victoria, and changed to Cobh, the Irish spelling of Cove, in 1920 during the War of Independence. The name is still said the same way: cove.

More people emigrated through this harbour than any other in Ireland. The Famine coffin ships left from here, and so did the steamers that carried two and a half million people to America between 1848 and 1950. Annie Moore, a fifteen-year-old from Cobh, was the first person processed through Ellis Island when it opened in 1892, and her statue stands by the old station. The Titanic made Queenstown its final port of call in April 1912, and the Lusitania, torpedoed off the Old Head of Kinsale in May 1915, was brought to grief within sight of the harbour; the survivors were landed here and the dead were buried above the town. The cathedral that towers over the waterfront, St Colman's, took nearly fifty years to build and holds the only carillon in Ireland.