Cobh, the last port many of them ever saw

Cobh rises from the water in tiers, its pastel-coloured terraces climbing a steep hill above Cork Harbour towards the spire of St Colman's Cathedral, a neo-Gothic building whose carillon of bells is one of the largest in Ireland. It is a genuinely pretty town, and it is also, in ways the postcards do not dwell on, one of the saddest small ports in Europe, because for the better part of a century it was the place from which Ireland left.

Cork Harbour itself is part of the reason the town mattered so much. It is one of the largest natural harbours in the world, deep and sheltered enough to hold entire fleets at anchor, which made it a natural gathering point for emigrant ships, naval convoys and, in quieter centuries, the ordinary trading vessels that kept Cork's merchants in business. A small island in the harbour, Spike Island, has done duty over the centuries as a fortress, a prison and, for a period, one of the largest convict depots in the British Isles, before its more recent life as a visitor attraction telling that history plainly.

The doorway out

The town has changed its name twice in living memory of its older residents' grandparents. Originally Cove, it was renamed Queenstown in 1849 to mark a visit by Queen Victoria, and renamed again, to Cobh, the Irish spelling of its original name, after Irish independence in 1922. Under either name, it served for more than a century as the principal port of emigration for Ireland, handling well over two million people who left for America and elsewhere between the Great Famine of the 1840s and the mid-twentieth century. A statue on the quayside remembers one of them by name: Annie Moore, a fifteen-year-old from County Cork who sailed from here in 1891 and became, on New Year's Day 1892, the first immigrant processed through the newly opened Ellis Island in New York, a distinction marked by a matching statue on the other side of the Atlantic.

Two ships that never should have needed remembering

Cobh's harbour carries two more specific, and more painful, associations with the sea. It was the last port of call for RMS Titanic, which anchored offshore on the 11th of April 1912 to take on a final 123 passengers by tender before continuing towards its fate in the North Atlantic days later; the Titanic Experience visitor attraction now occupies the old White Star Line ticket office where those last passengers checked in. Three years later, in May 1915, the Cunard liner Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine off the Old Head of Kinsale, not far along the coast, and Cobh took in many of the survivors and the dead, a number of whom are buried in the town's Old Church Cemetery. Between them, the two disasters gave a small Irish harbour an outsized role in two of the defining maritime tragedies of the early twentieth century, entirely against its will.

A gentler visit today

None of this makes Cobh a mournful place to call at now. The waterfront promenade, the cathedral and the steep, colourful streets above the harbour are as cheerful as any Irish seaside town, and the museum housed in the old railway station tells the emigration story with a directness that manages to be moving rather than heavy-handed. Ambassador's Historic Harbours of Britain and France, seven nights from Tilbury, calls at Cobh between the Isles of Scilly and Plymouth, treating it as one stop among several historic harbours rather than a single-issue destination.

Fred. Olsen's Cultural Charm of Ireland, six nights from Liverpool, spends longer in Ireland itself, taking in Cobh alongside Galway and Killybegs, while Fred. Olsen's Coastal Gems and Culture of Ireland, nine nights from Rosyth, pairs it with Dún Laoghaire and a sail-past of Carrickfergus Castle in Belfast Lough.

A morning is enough to see the cathedral, walk the harbour front and take in the Annie Moore statue, looking out at the same water her ship left by. It is a short visit for a town that has, over two centuries, had to say goodbye to rather more people than it ever expected to.