Things to do in Cork with kids

A hundred acres of open park on Fota Island, run as a charity, where most of the animals live without bars between you and them. Giraffes, rhinos, cheetahs and kangaroos share paddocks with the path, and the walk around the whole park is 4.5 km. The park counts on families spending two and a half to three hours here, and that is about right once the children find the second playground.

It has bred well this year: a Nubian giraffe calf in late August and an Indian rhino calf in early August, both born in the park rather than bought in.

Sixty acres of parkland built around a castle nearly six hundred years old, and the reason most visitors come is at the top of it: lean backwards over a gap in the battlements and kiss the Blarney Stone. Children mostly forget the stone within the hour and remember the Poison Garden instead, planted to teach visitors which plants can kill them, and the Rock Close with its caves and dungeons underneath the castle.

The estate runs an Autism Friendly Blarney programme, with a downloadable visual guide for anyone who wants to walk the route before they go.

A city park with a playground, a bandstand and a skate bowl, and inside it the oldest local-authority museum in Ireland: sixty thousand objects covering seven thousand years of Cork, and free to walk into. It opened to the public in 1904 and the museum followed in 1945, and both have been a Cork parent's answer to a wet Sunday ever since.

A 19th-century prison you can wander through corridor by corridor, and get locked into a cell if your children ask nicely. The gaol keeps a quiz sheet for younger visitors and tells its story through the prisoners who were actually held here — Countess Markievicz among them, who is recorded calling it the most comfortable jail she had ever been in.

It opened as a visitor attraction in 1993, after eighty years as a working prison, and the guided tour takes 45 minutes.

A 16th-century castle on the river that is also a working space-science centre, and the two halves sit inside the one ticket: a self-guided walk through the castle, then an exhibition called Ireland In Space, from Newgrange to New Space, and a Star Show under the dome.

A covered food market that has traded since 1788, and less a shopping trip than a Cork institution parents bring their children to on principle. Fishmongers, butchers, cheese stalls and a bakery run under one roof, and there is nothing to buy a ticket for.

The White Star Line building in Cobh, the actual room where Titanic's last passengers boarded on 11 April 1912. Every visitor is handed a boarding card for one of the 123 people who left from here, and finds out their fate at the end of the guided tour, which runs about 40 minutes. A rare chair salvaged from the rescue ship Carpathia sits among the exhibits.

The oldest church in continuous use in Cork, in use since 1722, and the tower above it is what draws children: 132 steps to a viewing balcony past the clock mechanism that gave the tower its nickname, the Four-Faced Liar, because its four faces used to tell different times.

A petting farm that added a barrel train, a digger park you can actually operate, crazy golf and an indoor play barn, so a wet morning is as covered as a dry one. The farm runs its own ice-cream and chocolate factory, and the car park and coach park are free.

A 104-acre island in the harbour that has been a military fort and a prison, reached by a 15-minute ferry from Cobh. A dozen museums and exhibitions are spread across it, and the whole visit — ferry, guided tour and time to explore — runs about three and a half hours.