Day Twenty-Nine - 9/10/2012 - Cork

     North Mall, the street on which I now live, has its fair share of history.  It was a Franciscan friary during the Middle Ages, known by many names.  Shandon Abbey, North Abbey, St. Mary's Shandon, and St. Francis Abbey, names that have all left their mark on the surrounding streets and businesses.  The friary was likely to have been founded in 1229 by the Diarmaid MacCarthy Mor, the King of Desmond.  Its ruins survived until 1836 when Abbey Square was built upon the old friary.
     Abbey Square was, and is, a rectangular block of housing open on the face nearest the river, probably built before 1787.  The current buildings are from the nineteenth century.  The friary contained a well, the waters of which were said to be curative and even able to restore the vigor of youth.  The Franciscan Well Brewery Pub that rests near Abbey Square, and a few metres from my house, contains the original fountain, the waters of which are still flowing.  The Franciscan Well was built upon the site of Guinness bottling in Cork in the 1920s, becoming the pub it is today.
     A short ways up the other side of the North Mall, on the walk I take to campus every morning is an old, bow-fronted building that is known as the Francis Wise house.  The man after which the house is named was a distiller, who established the distillery in 1779 at the end of North Mall.  It was bought by the Cork Distillers Company in 1867, and damaged by fire in 1920.  Now owned by UCC and the Mercy University Hospital, it is used for educational purposes.  The distillery rests at the junction of North Mall and Wise's Hill, the adjacent street being named for the family of Francis Wise as well.
     The bridge that crosses the river just by the route I take to school is the pedestrian St. Vincent's Bridge, built in 1875.  The bridge is named for the church that rests atop a westward hilltop, overlooking the North Mall.  So much history just resting on my doorstep.