Kinsale / Charles Fort and Old Head
Day 2 in Ireland | A Day Trip to Kinsale, County Cork | Touring Charles Fort | Visiting the Cliffs at Old Head | July 2025
For our second full day in Ireland, we made plans to travel by bus down to Kinsale, a small town South of Cork and close to the Southern coast of Ireland. This day trip would take a bit more logistical planning, as we wanted to spend some time in Kinsale, but also wanted to take another bus down to the coast. That second bus had only 3 different times when it would make its route from Kinsale down to the coast, so we had to be strategic in planning which one to take down and exactly how long we had before getting on the next one.
After breakfast, we packed our day bags and made our way across the river to the bus station. We were learning that when it came to taking public transportation here, Google Maps was usually the most helpful and up to date. I liked that I could just click on a bus stop on the map and it would show me all the bus lines that went through that stop, the times, and where they went. This was especially helpful in planning these day trips — I would just see how far each bus went, then would research the towns that they ended up in to see if they’d be worth visiting. And thanks to our Leap passes, we could take these trips for less than 10 Euros round trip for both of us!
After an hour long bus ride, we disembarked in the heart of Kinsale. According to our (rather tight) schedule, we had about 3 hours before we needed to be on the bus to the coast. Our plan for those hours was to walk to Charles Fort, which was about 2km away. Thankfully the entire walk was very scenic as it followed the waterfront, then followed quieter, neighborhood streets up and down some hills, giving us even better views of the town, the inlet, and surrounding hills and countryside.
We arrived at the fort just before it opened, and waited on the grassy lawn to begin our tour. It was just 5 Euros per person to tour, with almost the entire fort being open to self-guided tours. We began our time in the museum, then made our way around the entire thing. This turned out to be my favorite fort/historic site we saw on our whole vacation — there was so much to wander through, and it was restored so well despite not being protected for most of the 70s/80s. After walking through the whole fort, we made our way to the entrance to listen to a park ranger talk about the history of the fort.
Kinsale harbor, like Cobh to the East, was a good port and was defended as such. An earlier castle stood near where Charles Fort is located. But with the advent of gunpowder and canons, warfare changed, and so did the forts. Charles Fort was one of the earlier examples of Star Forts designed to combat these new challenges and was designed by one of the pre-eminent military engineers of the 17th century. Unfortunately, the original design of the fort was not followed and, while it defended the coastal approach, neglected the hills in the rear.
And so, in the 1690’s, during the Williamite wars, the protestant forces of William the Orange, after taking Cork, attacked the Jacobite forces in Kinsale by bombarding the fort from the hills. An accidental explosion in the Fort ultimately resulted in its capitulation, and so the Southern towns fell to the Protestant-English forces and Ireland remained in the hands of the English.
After our tour, we made our way back to the heart of Kinsale, this time taking the Sicilian Walk along the water instead of the higher road. It was lush and green, and gave us even more pretty views of the town, with colorful buildings right up against the water. Curtis enjoyed picking blackberries off the bushes on the way back. We made it back to the bus stop with a little time to rest before our next bus arrived.
Our second bus was pretty full, as it’s the only one to access the coast and beaches South of Kinsale. This ride was about a half hour long, and we got off at the parking lot for Old Head. While the bus had been completely full, only a couple of others got off here with us. The lot is for the old lighthouse and museum/memorial for the Lusitania, which you can pay to walk up, but instead I lead Curtis on a little walk to find the cliffs I had read about online.
We walked down the road and turned left on a gravel road, which led down to some castle ruins and the entrance to a members only golf course. Before the entrance, we followed a worn path on the right towards the edge of the cliffs, and were blown away by what we saw. Rocky, dramatic cliffs towered over the sea, with waves crashing into the rocks below. In the distance, we saw the continuation of the coastline, with rolling hills as far as we could see. And of course, to the South was our first real unobstructed view of the ocean from the coast of Ireland.
We wandered along the cliff until we found a spot to eat our lunch (which consisted of bread and chocolate croissants from breakfast) and we watched the waves, the seagulls, and looked out for any whales or other marine life. I thought back to a trip we took almost 9 years ago to Nova Scotia, Canada, when we made a random decision to turn down one road and ended up coming across one of the most beautiful scenes of that trip, White Point. Another rocky coastline (though not as high up as this one) surrounded by sea and with mountains in the distance. I remember being there and thinking this was as close to the scenery in Ireland or Scotland that we’d ever seen. Now here we were…in Ireland, still following the roads less traveled in search of beautiful places.
After our long lunch, we continued following the worn path along the cliff, which eventually made a steep descent all the way down to the coastline. It became a little too treacherous for me, but Curtis made it all the way down and found a sea cave at the end! We slowly made our way back, savoring the views and snapping lots of pictures. We made the most of the ~3 hours that we could spend at Old Head before our bus returned to bring us back to Kinsale.
When planning our trip, I read over and over that you can’t miss seeing the Cliffs of Moher or the Cliffs of Kerry when visiting Ireland. However, both of those were over 2 hours from us in Cork, so we would either need to piece together a long day of travel via public transport, rent a car, or pay something like 70 Euros per person to take a tour bus. I’m sure it would have been worth it had we decided to spend a whole day traveling to either of these places, but this whole little adventure that we went on to find our way to these cliffs that are much less popular, and to discover all these little viewpoints that we hadn’t seen all over the internet just felt much more ‘us’. I went on this trip just hoping to see a quintessential view of cliffs over the sea in Ireland, and this adventure definitely checked that box!
We returned to Kinsale, and then spent another hour just walking through the town streets. We walked to the cathedral and castle within the town, and stopped to get some ice cream before returning to the bus stop. I had read that this is one of the most colorful towns in Ireland, and it’s not hard to see why! So many of the houses and buildings are painted in bright colors. At the end of the day, we were so glad we had spent the day exploring this area. Each stop we made was so enjoyable, it easily became our favorite day of the entire trip! We took the bus back to Cork, where we grabbed dinner at O’Flynn’s Gourmet Sausage Co. and picked up some other goodies at a Tesco.
