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Few Irish towns carry as much weight in the collective memory as Cobh, the harbour settlement on Great Island in Cork Harbour that served for generations as the principal point of departure from Ireland to the wider world. Pronounced 'Cove', it was known as Queenstown from 1849 until Irish independence, and it was under that name that the port became synonymous with the great waves of emigration that emptied the Irish countryside throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More than three million people left through this harbour between the Famine years and the early 1900s, and the town has never quite shed that elegiac quality, even as its colourful terraced houses climb the hillside above the water in a way that strikes most visitors as unexpectedly cheerful.

The connection to the Titanic is the thread that draws many visitors here in the first place. Cobh was the last port of call for the RMS Titanic on 11 April 1912, and 123 passengers boarded that day, the majority of them travelling in third class. The Titanic Trail, a guided walking tour of the town, follows that story through the streets and down to the deep-water quays, placing the ship's brief visit within the broader context of the emigrant experience. It is a tour that works precisely because Cobh itself is the exhibit: the Victorian architecture, the cathedral on the hill, the quayside where tenders once ferried passengers out to liners too large to dock.