An Linn Dubh · Co. Cork
The valley where Cork did its dirty, profitable work - tanneries, the brewery, and a hurling club that owns half the county's medals.
Blackpool is the valley just north of Cork city centre, in the low ground where the Glen River runs down toward the Lee and the northern hills rise on either side. It first turns up in the record in 1734, when Cork Corporation built a Guard House here - this was the main road north, the thoroughfare to Mallow, Limerick and Dublin, and the city watched who came and went.
What it became was industrial. Weaving and wool-combing first, helped by army and navy contracts during the Napoleonic wars. Then tanning - Griffith counted twenty-one tanneries in the valley in 1852 - alongside bacon curing, distilling and brewing. Generations of Blackpool worked at Gouldings, Harringtons, Dennys, Sunbeam and, above all, Murphy's. This was where Cork made its money and breathed its smells.
Don't come for postcards. Blackpool is a working suburb, not a destination - the kind of place you walk through on the way up to Shandon, or stop in for a pint in a pub that has not been refitted. The two things worth your attention are the brewery still going on Leitrim Street and the hurling tradition of Glen Rovers and Na Piarsaigh, the two clubs that carry the north side. The Church of the Annunciation, designed by the sculptor Séamus Murphy and finished in 1945, is the landmark on the hill.
If you are here, you are close to everything. St Anne's Shandon with its salmon weathervane and the North Cathedral are a short walk south up the slope, the city centre is fifteen minutes on foot, and Blarney is twenty minutes out the N20. Blackpool is a base and a pass-through more than a stop, and there is no shame in that.