Qualla: Bandon, County Cork

Bandon, County Cork: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Dibb, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the gates of Bandon, when it was a walled Protestant settlement in the early 17th century, somebody carved a warning: Entrance to Jew, Turk or Atheist; any man except a Papist. Below the inscription, somebody else scrawled an answer: The man who wrote this wrote it well, for the same thing is writ on the gates of hell. Both inscriptions are gone. The wall is gone. But the dialogue between the two of them is what Bandon has been about for four hundred years. It is a planted town built deliberately as a Protestant settlement on the River Bandon, and the long argument over what that means, who belonged here and who did not, has shaped almost every chapter of its history.

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Image: Michael Dibb | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bandon, County Cork: Bridge on the River Bandon

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E Turk, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Irish name means bridge of the Bandon, a reference to the river crossing that gave the town its first reason to exist. Bandon was incorporated as a municipal borough by a charter of James I in 1614. Buildings sprang up on both sides of the river and a series of bridges linked...

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Image: E Turk | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bandon, County Cork: Whiskey, Weaving, Industry

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Wood, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 19th century Bandon became one of the leading industrial centres of West Cork. Allman's Distillery at its peak produced more than 600,000 gallons of whiskey a year. Brewing, tanning, corn and cotton milling all flourished. The Industrial Revolution and the railways brought...

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Image: Andrew Wood | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bandon, County Cork: Percival and the Surrender of Singapore

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Valdoria~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Major General Arthur Ernest Percival commanded the British garrison in Bandon in 1920 and 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. The connection feels almost too neat: Percival would go on to become the British commander in Malaya in 1942, where he surrendered Singapore to th...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Valdoria~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Bandon, County Cork: The 1922 Killings

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Dibb, CC BY-SA 2.0. Between 1911 and 1926, the non-Catholic population of Bandon fell from 688 (22 percent of the total) to 375 (13 percent), a drop of 45.5 percent. Some of that fall was emigration, marriage, ordinary demographic change. Some was not. In April 1922, in the brief gap between the tru...

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Image: Michael Dibb | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bandon, County Cork: Graham Norton, Gorse, and the Flood

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dzjamkokarlis, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bandon today is a town of around 8,000 people, the Gateway to West Cork, sitting 27 km southwest of Cork city on the N71. Its twin city across the Atlantic, Bandon, Oregon, was founded in 1873 by Lord George Bennett, a Bandon native who named the American town after his home and ...

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Image: Dzjamkokarlis | CC BY-SA 4.0