Roger Herlihy: Barrack Street, Saint Fin Barre’s cathedral, William Burgess, Elizabeth Fort, Jimmy Page, Pavilion cinema, Second World War

St Fin Barre's.jpg

Title

Roger Herlihy: Barrack Street, Saint Fin Barre’s cathedral, William Burgess, Elizabeth Fort, Jimmy Page, Pavilion cinema, Second World War

Subject

Cork's Built Heritage

Description

Ronnie talks about some of the buildings of the South Parish, such as Saint Fin Barre’s Cathedral and Elizabeth Fort, and comments on some related photographs.
Ronnie (b. circa 1963)talks about the laying of the foundation stone for Saint Fin Barre’s and the introduction of ‘the goldie angel’, a statue that was afterwards said to be the herald of the end of the world. The architect was William Burgess, and guitarist Jimmy Page, who lives in the architect’s house, came to Cork in 2005 to talk about Burgess. Ronnie tells a story about people hearing what they thought was a ghost in the cathedral and exhuming a recent burial, only to find that the strange noises were coming from owls in the belfry.
He mentions Elizabeth Fort, and the Gateway Bar, believed to have been established in 1698, and the oldest surviving pub in Cork city. During the Second World War, the fort housed an air raid shelter, and he names other shelter locations in the city.
Ronnie discusses a photograph of the old barracks building in Barrack Street, which dated to the 1700s and which was burned out during the Civil War. The barracks were housed in Elizabeth Fort, and he gives a history of the buildings’ use.

Note: this interview was conducted for the DVD If the Walls Could Talk.

Date

12 October 2013

Identifier

CFP_SR00492_herlihy_2013

Coverage

Cork City; Ireland; Built Heritage; 1770s-200Os;

Relation


Published Material:

If the Wall Could Talk: Stories Of Cork's Heritage (2013) DVD

If the Stones Could Speak: More stories from Cork's heritage (2015) DVD

Related Material in CFP Archive:

CFP00512_herlihy_2014

Source

Cork Folklore Project Audio Archive

Rights

Cork Folklore Project

Language

English

Type

Sound

Format

1 .wav File

Interviewer

Duration

38m 53s

Location

Douglas, Cork City, Ireland

Original Format

.wav

Bit Rate/Frequency

Audio/Wav 48kHz/24bi

Transcription

The following is a short extract from the interview transcript, copyright of the Cork Folklore Project. If you wish to access further archival material please contact CFP, folklorearchive@gmail.com

M W: Could you tell me a little bit there just what you were saying before I recorded there of -- was their ghosts in the belfry or some myth like that?

R H: Yeah, there was a story in 1840 em there was kinda ghosts -- there was very -- a lot of superstitions around the place of course and every now and again, there’d be fellas, maybe locals just doing the maggot basically and they’d be kinda knocking on walls and they’d be making noises and people would be saying oh tis a ghost. I know there was one case in up in the Quaker Meeting -- the Quaker graveyard in Windmill Road there you know -- or Quaker Road, em like that now there was stones being thrown over the roof on to the lodge where the graveyard is and of course they thought twas a ghost and people were seeing all kinds of things on the roof and everything but twas only a couple of guys throwing stones like you know? But going back then to around 1840 I think it was, there was a -- something similar -- not stone-throwing now but there was unusual noises let’s say being heard in the vicinity of the old cathedral now, not the present one, so you’re talking twenty years before the present one was built, twenty-odd years. So again hundreds of people were gathering in the area waiting to see some supernatural event and the church authorities or the cathedral authorities got in such a tizzy over it that they decided to perform an exhumation of a woman who had been just buried maybe a few days before in one of the aisles of the cathedral. And so they dug her up anyway and they were quite happy when they opened the coffin that she was as dead as they’d left her the last time, you know was what the saying said like. So she was dead anyway so they locked her up again and buried her again and everybody went away. But afterwards they put up a ladder and had a look up in the belfry and they found a pair of owls [laughs] which were the source of the noises, you know. But I mean, as I said it just begs the question like, the mentality that was there they’d -- why didn’t they put up the ladder first and have a look in the belfry? Their first thing they did was dig up a woman who had died like you know. [laughs] I mean what would be the easiest thing to do -- We’ll have a look in the belfry first or we’ll exhume somebody like you know, but they did the exhumation first before they looked in the belfry you know. [laughs] So.

Citation

Cork Folklore Project, “Roger Herlihy: Barrack Street, Saint Fin Barre’s cathedral, William Burgess, Elizabeth Fort, Jimmy Page, Pavilion cinema, Second World War,” accessed March 29, 2024, https://corkfolklore.org/archivecatalolgue/document/6.