Two charming coastal cities and a mini-cruise into the bargain. STEPHEN McCLARENCE puts the resuscitated ‘Celtic connection’ Irish Sea service linking Swansea and Cork to the test

THINGS  can only get better  for Fastnet Line’s new ferry service between Swansea and Cork. Due to be launched on March 1, faults delayed the maiden voyage by nine days and after just three Irish Sea crossings Fastnet cancelled two further sailings on March 13 and 14 for repairs.

The 28-year-old MV Julia, which formerly sailed the Baltic Sea, can carry 400 cars and more than 1,800 passengers but had just 160 on board for its first trip. It should have taken 10 hours but the 21,000-tonne ship docked in Cork two hours late and the return journey that night took 16 hours.

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Despite these setbacks the ferry, bought for €7million by a co-operative, deserves to succeed. Reviving a popular service which ran for 30 years until late 2006, when the previous vessel was sold, the company will offer six overnight sailings  a week and extra sailings during summer, making it possible to sample a two-centre “Celtic connection” break in the  twinned cities of Swansea and Cork with a mini-cruise thrown in.

How does the ship rate? Well, it looks smart if a bit “lived-in” in places. The 300 en-suite cabins, from two- to four-berth, are comfortable though some, including mine, could do with curtains. The restaurant is stylishly designed and offers decent food  and friendly, efficient service but at €35 the three-course set menu is a little steep.

Passengers also seemed pleased. “I’ve been crossing the Irish Sea for 30 years and this is the most comfortable ship I’ve been on,” said Peggy Davies from Port Talbot as Cobh Cathedral towered over the bay on our approach to Cork. Along the deck, Gilbert Miles and three fellow Wales rugby fans were en route to their team’s game against Ireland. “It’s superb.

I can’t fault it,” he said. “I prefer this to flying. It’s a bit of an adventure, isn’t it?”

He’s right. As we docked in Cork there was a real sense of arrival, of travel rather than just transit. Fastnet has had its teething troubles but as Ivan Walsh, one  of the ship’s two captains, said with a wry, Irish smile: “Worse things happen at sea.”

CORK
Up a steep side street across the river from the city centre, an enticing smell drifts through the afternoon. A smell that wafts you back to childhood; the smell of apple drops and bull’s eyes, lollipops and rock. I push open the broad front doors of the Exchange Toffee Works and step into another world. Here are screw-top jars of the brightly coloured boiled sweets, butterscotch and cough drops made by hand in this tiny sweet factory. Tony Linehan’s grandfather set it up in 1928 and the four-strong staff are still using solid copper vats and brass presses in  a pointed rejection of mass production.  

“It used to be a huge industry but we’re the last one left in the whole of Ireland that I know of,” says Tony. It’s just one of the idiosyncrasies of a city that feels a little like an Irish Paris, a strollable place with pavement cafés, parks and bric-a-brac markets that’s partly built on an island in the middle of the river that flows through it. The River Lee isn’t quite as grand as the Seine but after a couple of pints of Murphy’s you might believe it is.

There are many fine Georgian buildings here, notably the Church of St Anne in  the Bohemian district of Shandon. Its four-clock tower is known locally as “the four-faced liar” because they’re often out of sequence. The city makes the most  of its past with a heritage centre in the former jail exploring prison life (and also, rather curiously, the early days of radio broadcasting). The Butter Market, once the world’s largest, is now a museum and
the old waterworks is the Lifetime Lab, which offers a “fun way to learn about water, waste and renewable energy”.

I lunch at the superb Farmgate Café in the English Market with its beguiling arrays of local cheeses, fish and sausages stuffed with black pudding.

Outside, a street singer throws his trilby to the floor and launches into a John McCormack medley as the warm fug of afternoon drinking seeps out of innumerable bars. On the way to the pretty coastal resort of Kinsale with its dazzling, brightly coloured houses and shops, I have an entertaining driver in Gerald McSweeney. “You know about single yellow lines?” he asks. “We say they mean no stopping at all. And double yellows mean no stopping at all, at all.” Just a small taste of the Gaelic humour you can enjoy on the Emerald Isle.

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SWANSEA
Don’t assume Swansea is just the place the ferry leaves from as it offers plenty to see in its own right. Most tourists head to the Maritime Quarter, the old dockland area regenerated as a marina.

The sleek new waterfront is lined with spas and cafés, which have taken over the old warehouses and created a little pocket of panini-land. The new National Waterfront Museum is full of imaginative displays with plenty of hands-on stuff that defeated me but would be child’s play for the average five-year-old. Nothing is more poignant than black-and-white footage of trawlermen and dockers in the Forties.

It seems long, long ago but it’s pretty recent in comparison with the delightful Swansea Museum, Wales’s oldest, still full of Victorian atmosphere.

After the Egyptian mummy in its own tomb-like room, stuffed birds and cases of pinned butterflies, a no-holds-barred exhibition about tattooing is a bit of a shock. Dylan Thomas, Swansea’s most famous son, called it “a museum which belongs in a museum”. The poet himself is commemorated at the Dylan Thomas Centre, a thriving arts venue that draws you powerfully into his world and includes the scuffed blue doors of his writing shed in Laugharne, rescued from a rubbish tip by an admirer.

Across from this is the stylish Morgans Hotel, a Grade II-listed former port authority offi ce with a terrifi c restaurant in the old boardroom. Its breakfast menu includes laverbread, a tasty delicacy based on boiled seaweed, usually eaten with bacon or cockles and sold in Wales’s biggest indoor market, Swansea Market.

A few miles out of the city, the bijou seaside resort of Mumbles offers delis, wine bars, boutiques, craft and design shops, a Victorian pier and a hint of Gower Peninsula’s sweeping beaches and grand landscapes. I’ll save that for my next trip.

GETTING THERE:

Fastnet Line (0844 576 8831/www.fastnetline.com) offers return sailings from Swansea to Cork from £156 each way (one car and two passengers sharing a twin-berth cabin). Foot passengers from £18 per adult, £14 per child.

Morgans Hotel,  Swansea (01792 484 848/ www.morganshotel.co.uk) offers doubles from £65 (two sharing), B&B.

Visit Wales: 0800 915 6567/www.visitwales.co.uk

Tourism Ireland:  0808 234 2009/www.discoverireland.com