Ballincollig is a place of some interest. The powder mill is a long-established factory, and gives considerable employment in the neighbourhood. The large cavalry barracks is amongst the finest in the south of Ireland.
Blackrock is little better than a fishing village; but the suburbs between it and Cork are filled with villa residences, pleasure grounds, and market gardens. Beside the road, between the city and the village, are situated the well-known nursery gardens belong to Hartland. The daffodil farm, when the flowers are full, is a sight very difficult to surpass in the three Kingdoms. Maxwellstown House, on the slope of a southern hill, was the scene of a tragedy, not yet forgotten in Cork. After a marriage dejeuner, the bride retired to her dressing-room to don her going-away dress, but the bridegroom waited in vain for her return. She had died suddenly in the arms of those who attended her; and the story goes that the disconsolate lover dismissed the servants, shut up the house with everything just as it was, and went on his way out into the wide world alone. Long years afterwards, when news of his death came from a far-off land, his next-of-kin had the house re-opened, and found everything just as it had been left half a century before, after the wedding breakfast. The dust and cobwebs were cleared away, and all went to the hammer.
Eastward, towards the harbour's mouth, there is much to be enjoyed. Excursionists may take the train direct from the Great Southern and Western Railway terminus, or by Passage from the Albert Station, and then by steamer to Queenstown. Taking the direct line the train runs almost parallel with the promenade called the Marina, which separates from the river side the broad pasture known as Cork Park, which is the local race course. A race meeting at Cork is well worth witnessing. The gay young bucks, described long ago by Arthur Young, still are with us, and they and their lady friends make a fine flutter during race week.
Photo—Lawrence, Dublin.
Queenstown Harbour.
Passage (West) was once the busy site of ship-building and dock-yards, but the industry is no longer of anything like its original proportions. The town is an old-fashioned place, and has not escaped the pen of Father Prout, who, in what he calls "manifestly an imitation of that unrivalled dithyramb," The Groves of Blarney—with little of its humours and all its absurdity—signs the attractions of what he styles a fashionable Irish watering-place:—
"The town of Passage
Is both large and spacious,
And situate
Upon the say;
'Tis nate and dacent,
And quite adjacent
To come from Cork
On a summer's day."
Steamers ply between the railway station at Passage and the many little towns around the port. Glenbrook and Monkstown are particularly picturesque. Above the latter, nestling in the trees, may be seen Monkstown Castle, the legend attached to which says it was built for one groat. The owner of the site, one of the Archdeckens, an Anglo-Irish family, having gone away to the wars in the Lowlands, his better-half promised him a pleasant surprise on his return. She employed a number of workmen to build the castle, a condition of the contract being that they should buy their food from her while so engaged. Truly, she was a shrewd woman. Her profits were such, that she had enough to pay the entire cost of the work, less one solitary groat.
Spike Island is mentioned in Church History as a present given by a Munster King to St. Cartach, of Lismore. In modern times it was used as a convict prison, the convicts' labour being employed in the construction of the fortifications around the harbour.