Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne, Catholic cathedral in Cork, Ireland
The Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne is a Roman Catholic cathedral at the top of Shandon Street in Cork, built in early Neo-Gothic Revival style from 1799 and dedicated in 1808. It combines sandstone with limestone dressings, and the tower over the main door, designed by John Benson, was added in 1869. The interior, redesigned in 1996 by Richard Hurley & Associates, is finished in white limestone.
Construction began in 1799 under Bishop Francis Moylan on the site of a 1730s church, and the cathedral was dedicated on 22 August 1808. Arson on 3 June 1820 badly damaged it; George Richard Pain restored it, enlarging the sanctuary and adding a chancel arch, and it reopened in 1828. John Benson designed the tower added in 1869.
The name joins the ecclesiastical parish of St Mary with the civil parish of St Anne, and locals still call it the North Chapel. John Hogan carved twenty-seven wooden statues for the high altar in 1821; hidden in the 1960s and thought lost, they were rediscovered in the 1990s and now stand in the blind clerestory of the nave.
The cathedral stands at the top of Shandon Street, at the end of Cathedral Street, above the plain of Blackpool on the north side of the river, opposite the historic St Finbarr's Cathedral. The 2017 visitor centre beneath the sanctuary runs tours of the Cork Folklore Project exhibition. The building closed entirely during the 1994–1996 works, when parish masses moved to nearby convents.
The tower holds nine bells cast in 1870 by John Murphy of Dublin, originally designed for change-ringing, a practice where bells are rung in constantly shifting sequences. After decades of silence, the bells came back into regular use in December 2022.
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