Cove Street Archives - EXCELLENT STREET IMAGES

MAY 2023 VISIT TO CORK

Because of unpredictable weather conditions I was not able to complete some of my projects and failed to photograph in detail many areas that I had intended to visit or had visited previously. For example I had intended to photograph St Nicholas’s Church.

The street “Nicholas Church Lane” is located in the southwest of Cork. It is about 45 meters long.

St Nicholas’s Church is a significant mid nineteenth-century Gothic-Revival Church, with much original fabric intact. Designed by Welland, with steeple by Atkins and transept windows by Hemmings. Built to replace earlier church on same site. Deconsecrated, and internal fittings and fixtures stripped out in early 1990’s.

The church is described as follows: “Detached Gothic-Revival Church, built 1850; formerly Church of Ireland, now closed and deconsecrated; having slate steeply pitched roofs and limestone roof to steeple, squared limestone ashlar walls, stepped buttresses and cut limestone verges, with open timber roof to gallery and timber panelling to Chancel; set in elevated site with graveyard, limestone ashlar gateways to Cove Street and to Nicholas Church Lane, cast iron gates, with overthrow to Cove Street gateway; currently undergoing renovation.”

On April 17, 1921, Constable John Cyril MacDonald, a twenty-eight year old single man from 31, Whirring Stone Road, Fulham, London was walking with a female friend along Cove Street when two men approached them, heading towards Barrack Street. As they passed, one of the men jumped on McDonald and pinned his arms behind him. The other pointed a revolver at him which he tried to knock away but was shot in the face. As he lay on the ground he was again fired at a number of times. As the men then ran off down Cove Street, the girl rushed to the fire station on nearby Sullivan’s Quay to summon an ambulance for the dying man. However, he succumbed to his wounds five days later. McDonald had been a soldier prior to joining the Black and Tans and had been in Ireland for four months at the time of his shooting.