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North of the River Lee is the area known as Shandon , a sadly neglected reminder of Cork's eighteenth-century status as the most important port in Europe for dairy products. To get there head up John Redmond Street, or simply aim for the giant fish atop the church tower. The most striking survival is the Cork Butter Exchange , stout nineteenth-century Classical buildings recently given over to rather quiet craft workshops. The old butter market itself sits like a generously proportioned butter tub in a cobbled square, and now houses the Firkin Crane Theatre. Despite the air of dereliction, this part of town is worth a visit for the pleasant Georgian church of St Anne's Shandon (1750), easily distinguishable from all over Cork city by its weather vane - an eleven-foot salmon. The church is perhaps most famous for its bells, which feature in the verse of Father Prout , a nineteenth-century fictional character devised by an ex-Jesuit to satirize the church. You can climb its tower (daily: June-Sept 9.30am-5.30pm; Oct-May 10am-3.30pm; GBP3/?3.81) for excellent views and ring the bells - a good stock of sheet tunes is provided. To the west of here is an area known as Sunday's Well, and Cork City Gaol (daily: March-Oct 9.30am-6pm; Nov-Feb 10am-5pm; GBP3.50/?4.44). It's a good thirty minutes' walk from the city centre, up the hill from North Mall. A lively taped tour takes you through the prison, focusing on social history in a way that is both engaging and enlightening. It's occasionally threaded with characters of national importance, all vividly brought to life by a dramatic audiovisual finale. The gaol also houses the Radio Museum Experience (same times; GBP3.50/?4.44, combined ticket GBP6/?7.62) which uses similarly engaging techniques to convey the tremendous importance of the development of the wireless. When an audiovisual character in role as Marconi begins with a passionate "what is jolly about science is this: it encourages one to go on dreaming...to think [the] way to the truth of things" he takes you with him all the way. The museum also has a large collection of early radios, a wealth of popular archival recordings and a strangely affectionate and evocative reconstruction of the first radio station in Cork. There's a pleasant walk from here to Fitzgerald Park: turn right as you leave the prison, left, right and then left down a flight of steps and over the Shaky Bridge. The stark precision of nineteenth-century Gothic which is repeated time and again in the city's churches may not be to everyone's taste, but here it undeniably gives the city a rhythmic architectural cohesion. Both Pugin and Pain are very much in evidence, Pugin in the brilliant Revivalist essay of the Church of St Peter and St Paul on Friar Matthew Quay, with its handsome lantern spire, and Pain in St Patrick's Church on Lower Glanmire Road. Best of all is William Burges' St Finbarr's Cathedral (built 1867-79), obsessively detailed, with its impressive French Gothic spire providing a grand silhouette on the southwesterly shoulder of the city.
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