It started as Ballyvoloon, a fishing village on the high south face of Great Island looking down on a perfect natural anchorage. In 1720 the Water Club was founded on Haulbowline Island just offshore - the seed of what is now the Royal Cork Yacht Club, claimed (correctly, by Guinness World Records) as the oldest yacht club in the world. By the 1750s, the Royal Navy had established a port at the Cove of Cork, and the village above the water began to grow into something that needed proper streets and proper buildings. The Napoleonic Wars accelerated everything. The Royal Navy assigned an admiral to the station. The architect Decimus Burton was brought in during the 1840s to improve the streetscape, and many of the elegant terraces that climb the hill above the harbour date from this build-up. When the wars ended, Cobh transformed again - this time into a health resort, drawing patients seeking the mild Atlantic climate. Charles Wolfe, the poet who wrote 'The Burial of Sir John Moore After Corunna', came here for his health and is buried in the Old Church Cemetery outside town.

Between 1848 and 1950, six million Irish people emigrated to North America. Two and a half million of them sailed from this harbour. The figure is so large that it is hard to picture: a quarter of all the Irish people who ever went to America passed through this single small town. Many of them had walked or ridden coaches across the country in conditions worse than the steerage class they would soon endure. They came down the steep streets of Queenstown carrying everything they owned. They boarded the tenders at the deepwater quay, the same quay that survives largely unchanged today, and watched the green hills of Ireland slide below the horizon. On 1 January 1892, a fifteen-year-old girl named Annie Moore stood at this quay with her two younger brothers and waited for the tender that would take her out to a steamer bound for New York. Days later, Annie became the first person admitted to the United States through the new immigration centre at Ellis Island. A bronze statue of her stands in Cobh now, near the heritage centre. A second one stands at Ellis Island.

Queenstown was the Titanic's last port of call before she set out across the Atlantic on the last leg of her maiden voyage. She arrived on 11 April 1912, anchored offshore, and was assisted by two ageing White Star Line tenders - the PS America and the PS Ireland - which ferried 123 boarding passengers and first-class luggage out to the great ship along with several other smaller boats. The crew member John Coffey, a Cobh native, slipped off in the confusion and went home. By the afternoon the Titanic had weighed anchor and was heading out of Cork Harbour, past the headlands at Crosshaven and Whitegate, into the open Atlantic. She was sunk four days later. Of the 123 who boarded at Cobh, only 44 survived. The little town has commemorated the connection ever since: a Titanic Experience museum in the original White Star Line offices on the pier, the Titanic Trail walking tour, and a streetscape that has remained largely unchanged since 1912 - the same buildings, the same piers, the same view of the harbour that the boarding passengers saw on their last day.

On 7 May 1915 the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat off the Old Head of Kinsale while en route from the United States to Liverpool. 1,198 passengers died. 764 were rescued. The survivors were brought to Queenstown. The dead were brought too - over a hundred of them buried in the Old Church Cemetery just north of the town. The Lusitania Peace Memorial in Casement Square, a bronze Angel of Peace standing above two fishermen, was sculpted by Jerome Connor and unveiled in 1968. The same fishermen had spent days recovering bodies from the harbour and laying them out in the Arch Building. During the rest of the First World War, Queenstown became the base for British and American destroyers hunting U-boats. Q-ships - decoys disguised as merchant vessels with concealed guns - were named for this town: many were fitted out in Queenstown. When the first division of American destroyers arrived in May 1917, Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly asked the senior American officer, Commander Joseph Taussig, how soon his crews could be put to use. 'We're ready now, sir,' Taussig replied. The line is engraved on a plaque in Cobh today.

The town was renamed Queenstown in 1849, during a visit by Queen Victoria, but Irish independence reversed the gesture. On 2 July 1920, in the middle of the War of Independence, the local council passed a motion changing the name from Queenstown back to Cobh - the Irish Gaelicisation of the original 'Cove', sharing its pronunciation. Cork Harbour itself remained under British control until 1938, one of the Treaty Ports retained by the United Kingdom under the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Then, on 11 July 1938, the British handed the harbour defences back to the Irish military authorities at a ceremony attended by Taoiseach Éamon de Valera. The naval base became the headquarters of the Irish Naval Service, which it remains today, headquartered on Haulbowline Island opposite the town.

Cruise liners now bring almost 100,000 passengers a year to the Republic of Ireland's only dedicated cruise terminal, berthing in the town centre at Kennedy Pier. The streetscape they walk into has changed strikingly little since 1912. St Colman's Cathedral still dominates the skyline above the houses. The terraced lanes still climb up from the harbour like seating in a steep amphitheatre. The Royal Cork Yacht Club's old clubhouse, now the Sirius Arts Centre, still stands on the waterfront. Spike Island, the former prison and military fortress, is now a tourist attraction reached by ferry from Kennedy Pier. The Cobh People's Regatta fills August every year. And the long maritime past of the town - the emigrants, the Titanic, the Lusitania, the U-boat war, the Treaty Ports - is unavoidable for anyone who spends an afternoon here. Cobh, more than almost any town in Ireland, wears its history on the surface. There is too much of it to hide.