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Museums & Archives
While always keeping an eye to its promising future, Cork is also a city steeped in history and tradition.
The Cork City and County Archives was one of the first archive services to be set up in Ireland. Its job is to take charge of the proper management, custody, care and conservation of local records, ensuring that they can be appreciated by many generations to come.
The Archives is managed by a professional archivist and since 2006 has been housed in The Seamus Murphy Building, a new, purpose-built facility in Blackpool. This new home for Cork’s archives meets the most modern standards for the storage and use of archives including, climate-controlled strong-rooms, exhibition and lecture space, a large research room and facilities to enable the computerisation of records. Cork’s many museums ensure that the history of the city and county stay alive and play a part in the everyday lives of 21st Century Corkonians. The Cork Public Museum is situated on an 18-acre site in Fitzgerald Park on the Mardyke between UCC and a scenic stretch of the River Lee.
The museum’s collections are as rich and fascinating as the history of the city itself. It has memories of every period of Cork’s past from pre-history through the founding of the city and up to the War of Independence and Civil War. It also has a unique collection of Cork crafts including exhibitions of Cork glassware and Youghal needlepoint. If you’re particularly interested in life in Cork in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Cork City Gaol museum in Sunday’s Well is worth a visit. Among its “famous” prisoners was Countess Markievicz, champion of Irish independence and the first woman ever to be elected to the British House of Commons.
Other museums and heritage centres of particular interest in the Cork region include:
- The Radio Museum – attached to Cork City Gaol Museum
- Cork Butter Museum in Shandon – the story of Ireland’s most important export and the world’s largest butter market
- Cork Geology Museum based at UCC – housing 20,000 rock, mineral and fossil specimens as well as thousands of geological maps, photographic slides, offprints and books
- Cobh Museum – with exhibitions as varied as Lusitania memorabilia and the gear worn by Cobhwoman, Sonia O’Sullivan, when she won her Olympic Silver Medal in 1996
- Cape Clear Museum and Archive – a collection of records covering all aspects of life on this small island
- The Jameson Heritage Centre, Midleton Distillery – hear the story of Irish Whiskey on this 11-acre interpretative centre
- Cobh Heritage Centre (Queenstown Story) - retrace the steps of the 2.5 million adults and children who emigrated from Ireland
- Skibbereen Heritage Centre - houses The Great Famine Commemoration Exhibition & The Lough Hyne Visitor Centre
