It was early on a Sunday and very much gloomy when we visited Saint Fin Barre’s Cathedral. And, in celebration of Sunday mass, the cathedral’s tollers (bell ringers) were out in full force. This was La Niña’s first exposure to campanology and she (very luckily) found a “secret” door that led us up one of the towers and into the guts of the bell tower. From the shadows she watched and listened to the ringers with slack-jawed amazement. I took a video but unfortunately erased it by accident shortly after.
St. Finbarr is another famous son of Cork (550–620AD)… perhaps the first. He was the Abbott in a monastery that sat atop a limestone cliff overlooking the River Lee. This monastery was the beginning of Cork city and an early centre of Christian learning.
The original monastery is long gone… but in its place is Saint Fin Barre’s Cathedral. Finbarr’s body is somewhere in the vast but crumbling bits that could be called a graveyard. Perhaps inside one of the many tunnels that have long been sealed and bricked over.
It was here that something strange happened. After years of carefully trying to neutralize any remnants of an east coast accent, I pointed at a feature on the cathedral and said “uuop there ahtahp the church” as though I was born on a fishing boat between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. It tore out of my mouth like a cork popping from a bottle of champagne and shocked everyone standing around me… including myself. Unfortunately, it stuck around and I’ve been fighting to get rid of it ever since.
