Cork- 23rd September

The English Market

A short post on Cork- mainly because we only spent a day there.  Feeling a little "over" churches and castles at this point we picked the two oddest things we saw in the guide book from the tourist office.  So.....we ended up with the Butter Museum and the Cork City Goal.

Strangely the Butter Museum seems to be quite the attraction in Cork, but I couldn't tell you why.  It was remarkable for being possibly less interesting than you might even have thought!  The one interesting bit was the old Butter Market and the adjacent Firkin Crane, also part of the old Butter Exchange.  They had been decorated with images made by cleaning parts of the concrete.

Morgan staring in rapt attention at a four handled wooden mug.  The label says "Irish four handled wooden mug, providence unknown, probably medieval".  So in other words an old wooden cup that they know nothing about.

School trip to the Butter Museum.  Kids these days don't know how good they have it.

The Butter Market

Art works created by cleaning the concrete.  Vandals are clearly not what they used to be either!

A firkin.  Firkin is a danish word meaning quarter barrel.  They used to put butter in it......FASCINATING

As I mentioned we also went to the Cork City Goal.  Apart from the dusty wax figures of guards it was actually pretty cool.

Entrance to the Cork City Goal

Morgan pulling the guards finger.  You probably had to be there, and possibly had to be a lot younger, to fully appreciate the humour here.

Despite all of the feverish excitement experienced above, our favourite parts of the day centred around (shock horror!) food and drink.  The old English Market is one of the oldest of its kind and has been trading since 1788.  It had a fabulous selection of food, particularly of meat and fish.  We stocked up on as much as we could carry and also had a great lunch.

Our other discovery was a microbrewery.  Since coming to Ireland (and in France for that matter) we've been a bit dismayed at the lack of local or regional beers on offer.  It's a bit disappointing to be offered the same, tasteless, multinational beer everywhere, so finding a microbrewery with interesting tasty beers is a real treat.  We also had a great chat with some random canadian tourists who were doing a similar "year off" as us, but just in lots of separate trips.

At the microbrewery

The rest of our evening was spent in a gastropub called Annie's.  The food and wine was great but the highlight was seeing a Berin McKenzie doppelganger!

At Annie's.

Blurry photo with Berin doppelganger in the background!