Spike Island: the ferry out to Ireland's Alcatraz

Out in the middle of Cork Harbour, a short hop from the Cobh waterfront, sits a low green island with a great star fort on top of it. That is Spike Island, and the trip out to it is the one excursion from Cobh worth building a day around. People call it Ireland's Alcatraz, which is a fair shorthand: it spent more than a century as a prison, and it sits on its own water with the town looking across at it.

What it actually is

Spike Island has been a lot of things across thirteen hundred years. There was a monastery here, founded in the seventh century. The huge fortification you see now, Fort Mitchel, is an artillery star fort built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to defend the harbour. And for long stretches, most notoriously during the Famine years, it was a prison, at one point one of the largest in the world, holding thousands of convicts, many of them awaiting transportation to Australia. It served as a prison on and off right up to 2004. So the island carries the harbour's whole range of history in one place: faith, war, punishment and emigration.

It has not gone unnoticed. Spike Island has been named Europe's leading tourist attraction at the World Travel Awards, which for a small island off a small town in Cork is no small thing.

How the trip works

You go out by ferry from Kennedy Pier on the Cobh waterfront, run by the island's own operator. The crossing is short, around fifteen minutes, and the whole visit runs about three and a half hours including the boat there and back. On the island there is a guided walk through the fortress and the prison blocks, and then time to wander the ramparts and the grounds on your own, with the long views back across the harbour to Cobh and out toward the sea.

The ferry runs seven days a week from April to October, and weekends only through the winter, so check the sailing days before you plan around it. Book the ferry ahead in summer, because the sailings genuinely sell out, and pick a settled day: a strong Atlantic southwesterly can cancel the crossing even when the town itself is sheltered. The adult ferry-and-tour ticket is around twenty-eight euro, with family and concession rates on the operator's site.

What to bring

Wear sturdy shoes and bring a layer. The walk up from the pier crosses old fortress ground with uneven surfaces and slopes, and the island is exposed to whatever the harbour is doing. There is some shelter and refreshment on the island, but treat it as a few hours outdoors rather than a quick indoor stop. If anyone in your group has limited mobility, contact the operator ahead, because the climb and the historic surfaces are a real consideration.

Fitting it into a Cobh day

Spike Island eats the middle of your day, so the sensible plan is to bracket it. Open with the Cobh Heritage Centre on the waterfront, take a late-morning sailing out to the island, and come back to the town in the mid-afternoon for a late lunch and the cathedral. That gives you the emigration story, the island and the spire in a single full day, and you can do the whole thing off the train from Cork without a car. The ferry pier, the Heritage Centre and the railway station are all within a couple of minutes of each other on the quay, which is the quiet luxury of Cobh: everything important sits on the same stretch of waterfront.