Pat Walsh: Barrack Street, Custom House, Dundanion Castle, Elizabeth Fort, Railways, Sculpture Factory, Trams, Transport,

Pat Walsh.png

Title

Pat Walsh: Barrack Street, Custom House, Dundanion Castle, Elizabeth Fort, Railways, Sculpture Factory, Trams, Transport,

Subject

Cork's Built Heritage

Description

Pat Walsh talks about some of the transport histories of Cork, including the railway and tramway systems and their associated infrastructure; and about the history of Elizabeth Fort.
He talks about the channels of the River Lee within the city and the bridges that cross the river. He recalls an accident in 1965 when a ship failed to anchor and crashed into one of the bridges. He remembers a fatal accident in 1945 when a steam train collided with a horse and cart.
He talks about the old buildings of the south of the city, and about his own developing interest in local history. He remembers Barrack Street and he talks about what Elizabeth Fort meant to him as a child and about its general history, particularly during the Siege of Cork in 1690

Date

12 October 2013

Identifier

CFP_SR00493_walsh_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:


CFP_VR00487_walsh_2014

Source

Cork Folklore Project Audio Archive

Rights

Cork Folklore Project

Language

English

Type

Sound

Format

1 .wav File

Interviewee

Interviewer

Duration

28m 43s

Location

Cork City, Ireland.

Original Format

.wav

Bit Rate/Frequency

24bit / 48kHz

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

P W While the area in front of the sculpture factory and the general area around the city here was quite busy, transport wasn’t moving very fast. Again you look towards the river, with the Sextant corner straight ahead on your right and the opening behind it, which took the track from where the Elysian Tower and complex is now, that was known as the Victoria Quay siding and despite the fact that traffic was going slow, be it road or be it rail, just by the Sextant Bar cutting was the, that was the scene of a fatal accident in 1945, a steam engine as it would have been at the time, pulling some six wagons of grain up from after being loaded off a ship on Victoria Quay, which is now Kennedy Quay, down towards where we’d say the Idle Hour bar and Victoria Road would be, it was proceeding, and the rules of the time were five miles an hour and preceded by a flag man, it the engine was coming out of the siding on to Albert Quay, Albert Street, right in front of the sculpture factory, when it collided with a horse and dray, now the man that was driving the horse and cart sadly was seriously injured and died on the scene, and his name was Walsh and he came from Custom House Street, now Custom House Street is a wide street now but it was a much narrower street at that stage, at that time. There are still some houses in Anderson’s Street, which is a very narrow street there between Parnell Place and Custom House Street and they would have been typical of the houses that would have been in Custom House Street, it was widened when Jury’s Hotel was built and the grain silos, mills
and warehouses there were knocked for that building. My mother, my late mother remembers the story of them being trapped for hours in the wreckage and she said all the doctors could do there, they couldn’t free him, was to give him morphine, but he died on, he died at the scene. That was in 1945.

Citation

Cork Folklore Project, “Pat Walsh: Barrack Street, Custom House, Dundanion Castle, Elizabeth Fort, Railways, Sculpture Factory, Trams, Transport,,” accessed March 29, 2024, https://corkfolklore.org/archivecatalolgue/document/7.