The history of Templerobin
Templerobin takes in Spike Island in Cork Harbour, a 103-acre point of ground once held to be the site of Saint Mochuda's 7th-century monastery, later fortified, held by Norman lords and Irish gentry, used as a convict depot and prison, and reopened as a heritage site in 2004.
Haulbowline Road sits on Spike Island in Cork Harbour, where a monastery tradition credits Saint Mochuda with a 7th-century foundation, later replaced by Fort Westmoreland, a star-shaped fortress begun in 1790. The island then served as a convict depot from 1847 to 1883 and an IRA and later Irish prison, closing in 2004 before reopening as a heritage site.
A monastery grew into a center of learning
Spike Island is an island in Cork Harbour, now run as a heritage tourist attraction with tours through its old fort and prison blocks. Long before any fort stood here, the island held a monastery. Records credit its founding to Saint Mochuda in the 7th century, though the attribution is disputed. One account, the Life of St Mochuda, ties him instead to a place called Rahen, not Spike. Whatever its founder, the monastery grew into a real center of learning. Marina Smyth argues the island may have been home to the "Irish Augustine," a monk whose manuscripts were made in the style of the Book of Kells. The Annals record an abbot here too: Sealbhac, who died in 821. A 1178 grant to an abbey in Dublin names a church on the island, Saint Rusien, pointing again to a Celtic monastic settlement. Ruins of that church were still being reported here as late as 1774.
Norman and Irish families held the island in turn
Ownership of the island passed through Norman and Irish hands for centuries. Raymond Mangunel was granted the island in 1182. In 1490, Thomas Pyke handed his holdings here to Maurice Ronan of Kinsale. The Roche and Galwey families held it until the Irish rebellion of 1641 cost them the land for good. By the 1650s, Spike Island had taken on a darker role. Oliver Cromwell's forces used it to hold Irish prisoners of war before shipping them off to the colonies of the Caribbean and the Americas, the start of a long history of the island as a place of confinement rather than worship.
A star-shaped fort replaced a temporary earthwork battery
Britain built its first fort on Spike Island in 1779, a temporary earthwork armed with eighteen cannon, raised to guard the harbor during the American War of Independence. It came down again in 1783 to save on rent. A bigger plan followed. In 1790, work began on a permanent star-shaped fort, named Fort Westmoreland. The foundation stone for the main structure was laid in June 1804. By 1806, the first regular garrison moved in. The walls, bastions, and barracks were largely finished by 1820, though money for the project ran dry before every detail was done.
A convict depot held over two thousand prisoners
In 1847, Spike Island became a convict depot meant to be temporary, but it lasted 36 years. Crowded into barracks built for far fewer, over two thousand prisoners were held here at once. Convicts quarried stone and built the docks at nearby Haulbowline, working off their sentences under harsh conditions. More than 250 of them are buried in a mass grave on the island's western side, many dead from the Great Famine years. John Mitchel, a leading Irish nationalist convicted of treason felony, was held here in 1848 before being shipped on to penal exile. Transportation to the colonies was abolished in 1853, but Spike Island kept its prisoners long after. The depot finally closed in 1883, and the island returned to purely military use.
IRA internees escaped the fort during the war
During the First World War, the crew of the German ship Aud was briefly held on the island after their failed gun-running mission ahead of the 1916 Easter Rising. The fort's role as a prison returned in force during the Irish War of Independence. From 1921, the British held up to 1,200 men here, IRA members and suspects alike. Conditions were tense. Internee riots that September ended with men marched into the dry moat as punishment. Escapes punctuated the year. On 29 April, three prisoners slipped away and were picked up offshore by motor launch. In November, seven more got out in a single night, among them Dick Barrett and Moss Twomey, both to become senior IRA figures.
Ireland raised its flag over a renamed fort
Spike Island stayed under British control even after Irish independence, one of three Treaty Ports kept by the UK under the 1921 treaty. That ended on 11 July 1938, when British troops handed the fort to the new Irish state. Éamon de Valera watched the Irish tricolor raised over the walls. The fort was renamed Fort Mitchel, after John Mitchel, the nationalist who had once been its prisoner. The island kept its military role for decades, later serving as a prison and young offenders institution. In 1985, inmates rioted; a government committee afterward found that officers and civilians on the island had become virtual prisoners of the men they guarded. The prison finally closed in 2004.
A former prison became Europe's top attraction
Cork County Council took over the island in 2010 to turn it into a heritage site. The transformation worked. By 2019, more than 81,000 people visited in a single year, and in 2017 Spike Island was named Europe's top tourist attraction at the World Travel Awards. Visitors now walk the same fort walls, barracks, and dry moat that once held convicts, prisoners of war, and IRA men. Haulbowline Island, across the water, has Famine dead interred there in the 1840s. In 1603, Cork's own city leaders were accused of plotting to tear down its new fortifications, a charge that saw the city's Recorder, William Meade, tried for treason.
Spike Island is open to visitors today, who can walk its star-shaped fort and former prison blocks by guided tour.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.