The story goes that one day in the 1940s, a few soldiers on Spike Island off Cobh decided to fire the 6-inch guns lying idle in their fort. I guess they thought it would be a blast.

Now, a 6-inch gun doesn’t sound much, but this was merely the size of its ammunition. The huge, then state-of-the-art guns had been left on Spike by the British when they handed over their so-called Treaty Ports to Ireland in 1938, and they had a range of 20km. They had never been fired in anger.

That day in the 1940s, the military lads decided to test them out. They didn’t warn anyone nearby, and one can only hope they put silencers in their ears when they fired the shells 20km due south out to sea.

Luckily, they hadn’t faced them the other way and fired north - as the shells would have caused a bit of a panic when they landed in Glanmire!

However, the good people of Cobh weren’t so lucky that day. Such was the ferocity of the blast of the guns, that many windows in the town were shattered.

Suffice to say that the next time the guns were tested, they relocated them to underground tunnels to soak up the blast, and warned all the residents of Cobh to open their windows.

That was just one of the many fascinating stories I heard last Sunday when I finally ticked one of........

© Evening Echo