hese

A Week In South West Ireland (2/8)

 

These pictures were touring around the South West coast of Ireland in October 2004.

  

 

 

 

A view of Saint Colman's Cathedral at Cobh looking very severe with the background of grey clouds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cobh was previously called Queenstown and was the last port of call for the Titanic. The old Victorian train station is now the Heritage Centre and houses an exhibition called The Queenstown Story which explains what it would have been like for the emigrants who travelled from Ireland to America. Around two and a half million of the six million emigrants left from Cobh.

The memorial statue I'm standing next to outside the Heritage Centre is of Annie Moore and her two brothers. Annie was the first emigrant to be processed in Ellis Island when it officially opened on 1st January 1892. Tragically Annie died four years later when she was hit by a train.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There must be more comfortable places to take a bath.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Later we drove to Cuskinny Marsh to park on bay, overlooking Ireland’s only oil refinery, Whitegate. Here is Mark with the Peugeot 206 which happily transported us on our 726 mile journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We stayed a second night at the same B&B and this time the weather and the view were much improved, so much so that after breakfast we could walk around the garden and sit outside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After breakfast we made our way to the Fota Wildlife Park, east of Cork. The park is cleverly laid out so that there is little to obscure our view of most of the animals. Mark had always wanted to see bison, we expected to visit somewhere like Poland to do this rather than Ireland!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pelicans were entertaining, especially when the wind caught their head feathers (move cursor over picture).

 

 

 

 

 

 

These rabbit-like animals are mara, a type of guinea pig from Argentina.

 

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