This is the history of what is now Cork’s Glen River Park. It traces the area’s progression from a proto-industrial zone in the early eighteenth century to the public amenity space it is today. Six mills once punctuated the valley: four corn mills, a flax mill, and an iron mill. In 1803, a distillery was added which later became Goulding’s first fertiliser factory in 1856. This account rediscovers these lost buildings and their owners, from the Dodge family in the 1700’s to Sir Basil Goulding, who donated the Glen to be used as a public amenity. Fortunes were made and lost along the way: the hapless Humphreys Manders went bankrupt, Daniel Callaghan was the richest self-made man in Cork and Anthony Perrier patented one of the first continuous whiskey stills in Europe.  

In the shadow of these industrial entrepreneurs, a social space was opening up for the growing city. The Fenian, Brian Dillon, nostalgically remembered the Glen mills in a poem written when in prison in England. Countless children learned to swim in the ‘Hatch’, and to play hurling on the ‘Black Patch.’

Together with the archival research that forms the greater part of this book, there are personal recollections of the author who grew up in the centre of the Glen in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Various short pieces have been written on ‘The Glen’ but it has never been the subject of a longer, thorough work. This book offers a distinctive insight into how a local area with a unique character contributes to the collective heritage of Cork city.