Sailing times

All times are local, which makes the clock exaggerate the crossing: France is an hour ahead, so the Saturday 16:00 sailing arriving at 07:00 is 14 hours at sea and the Wednesday Armorique run is 15. Two details the timetable graphics hide. The 2026 season opened on Wednesday 1 April and the last Cork departure is Saturday 31 October — and that final one is the Armorique, not the Pont-Aven, leaving at 16:01 for 08:45. Late-season Friday returns from Roscoff also drift: 22:50 on 9 October, 22:00 on 23 October, and the very last one, Friday 30 October, is an Armorique at 20:00. Brittany Ferries has already loaded 2027: first sailing Tuesday 23 March from Roscoff, last Saturday 6 November from Cork, with the Pont-Aven’s Roscoff departure pulled forward from 23:00 to 20:00.

Ticket prices

Lead-in prices quoted by Brittany Ferries’ own booking engine on 30 July 2026 for Saturday 17 October and Saturday 15 August 2026. Three things fall out of the numbers. The car fare effectively carries two people: a second adult adds €3, while a third adds about €47 in October and €63 in August. Foot fares, by contrast, are strictly per head. And accommodation is not optional — the engine flags a cabin or reserved seat as mandatory on every Cork–Roscoff sailing in both directions, so add that line to every figure above. Cabins are two-berth for pricing purposes, so a party of three pays for two and the accommodation cost doubles. Across the whole remaining 2026 season the cheapest car-plus-two-adults crossing was €207 (every October sailing) and the dearest €564, on Saturday 1 August.

Route map

Straight across the Celtic Sea from Cork Harbour to the north Brittany coast — no British landbridge, no second border to cross.

Planning a day visit

No. A day return is arithmetically impossible on a 14-hour overnight crossing that runs twice a week, so the real question is what the shortest possible round trip is. Wednesday out, Friday back. Leave Cork at 16:00 on the Wednesday, dock at Roscoff 08:00 Thursday, then check in again at Bloscon by 22:15 on the Friday for the 23:00 Pont-Aven, which lands you in Cork at 11:00 Saturday. That buys about 38 hours ashore in France for two nights on the boat.

Sail on the Saturday instead and the next return is not until Tuesday at 19:30, which gives you roughly 60 hours. The short version gets shorter in 2027: the Friday departure from Roscoff moves to 20:00, cutting those 38 hours to about 35.

Accessibility

Adapted cabins exist on both ships. On the Pont-Aven they are wheelchair-accessible four-berth outside cabins, and the operator says flatly that “availability is limited and early booking is essential”; the Armorique’s 247 cabins include wheelchair-accessible ones. When we queried the booking engine on 30 July 2026, though, no accessible cabin came back as available on any Cork–Roscoff sailing tested, in either direction, for 2026 or 2027. That reads as sold out rather than non-existent. Either way, it argues for booking by phone months ahead rather than clicking through the website.

The more consequential thing Brittany Ferries publishes is a cap. Assistance must be requested when you book and again at ticket check-in, and the company states that it may limit the number of passengers needing individual assistance on a given crossing and may be unable to carry you if that limit has already been reached. It also recommends travelling with an able-bodied companion, and warns that ship layouts can be awkward. The Ringaskiddy terminal itself is wheelchair accessible, with disabled toilets and electric wheelchair assistance; the Roscoff terminal likewise. The assistance line for Ireland is 021 427 7801. At the Roscoff end, the BreizhGo bus takes one wheelchair per coach and asks for a booking by 17:00 the previous day.

Before you board

Ringaskiddy is not Cork. The terminal sits on the west side of Cork Harbour at P43 HE29, and the operator’s own reckoning puts it 30–40 minutes’ drive from the city: N27 south, N40 east along the South Ring Road, Exit 9, then the N28.

• Check-in closes 45 minutes before departure, which means 15:15 for a 16:00 sailing. Travelling with an animal moves that to 90 minutes ahead.
• There is no long-stay car park. Brittany Ferries states plainly that parking at Ringaskiddy is “only permitted for dropping off and picking up”, and points anyone who needs to leave a car behind at the paid car parks at Cork Airport instead. Whatever is left at the port is left at the owner’s risk.
• Nothing to eat or drink at the terminal. The operator puts the nearest bar a mile away and the nearest restaurants four miles off, and the information desk only opens around arrivals and departures.
• The building is wheelchair accessible, with disabled toilets, a baby-changing area and electric wheelchair assistance on request.
• Bus Éireann route 223 runs from Cork city out past the terminal; see below. City-centre services and stops are covered on our Cork bus guide.

About the island

You do not arrive in Roscoff itself. Port du Bloscon is a deep-water quay a little east of the town rather than in the old harbour, and the walk into the centre takes about 15 minutes. Roscoff is a small fishing and market-gardening town of a few thousand people on the northern lip of Finistère, and it rewards not driving straight off: a granite sixteenth-century church tower, a tidal beach, the Station Biologique de Roscoff marine laboratory, and the boat over to the Île de Batz from the old pier.

This is also where the shipping line itself began. Brittany Ferries grew out of a Breton farmers’ co-operative looking for a way to get artichokes and cauliflowers to British kitchens, and Bloscon was built as the deep-water port that made it possible after the French government agreed to fund one in 1968. The same coast sent the Onion Johnnies to Ireland and Britain on bicycles hung with strings of pink onions, which is arguably the oldest trade route on this page.

One number this page does not carry: how much traffic the direct Ireland–Continent routes took off the British landbridge after Brexit. The Irish Maritime Development Office publishes it. imdo.ie returned 502 Bad Gateway to every request on 30 July 2026, so the figures are not here. A gap named rather than filled.

Cars and bikes

Deck space is never the constraint here. The Pont-Aven takes 650 cars and up to 2,400 passengers, the Armorique 470 cars and 1,500 passengers, and on the Armorique some vehicles are parked on an open deck when a sailing is busy.

Two wheels price oddly. In October a bike and rider was quoted at €100 against €95 for the same person on foot, a €5 premium; by mid-August that gap had widened to €25. Motorbikes are the outlier, ranging from €116 in October to €350 in mid-August — more than a car costs in the shoulder season.

Pets travel one of three ways, all of them bookable on this route: left in your car, in an on-board kennel, or in a designated pet-friendly cabin. The supplement in the booking engine came out at €55 to €61 per animal each way, and it made no difference whether the dog was large or small. Your cabin bill is where the animal really costs you. On one October sailing the cheapest accommodation available to a party with a dog was €330 rather than the €67 offered to the same party without one, because only pet-friendly cabins qualify and there are far fewer of them. Book the animal early, and remember the 90-minute check-in.

Booking

The cabin is not optional. Brittany Ferries’ booking terms require a cabin or reserved seat to be pre-booked on overnight sailings while any is still available, and the pricing feed confirms it: every single Cork–Roscoff departure tested, in both directions and across two seasons, came back flagged as accommodation-mandatory. Reclining seats go first. A run of August Pont-Aven sailings was already showing no seat space at all in late July, which leaves cabins as the only option.

October is the whole trick. Sailings sat flat at €207 for a car and two adults across the entire month, while the same booking on the first Saturday of August was €564. The spread runs inside a single week as well: the Wednesday Armorique is consistently cheaper than the Saturday Pont-Aven, €473 against €564 in early August, a €91 saving for one extra hour at sea and a plainer ship. Pricing is fully dynamic and the season bands are steep, which makes the date you pick the biggest single lever on what you pay.

Then the boat stops. The last Cork departure of 2026 is 31 October and the first of 2027 is 24 March: roughly twenty weeks with no service at all. Aggregator sites will tell you March to November, and at least one calls the route year-round; both are wrong for 2026. Brittany Ferries’ Irish operation moves entirely to Rosslare for those months.

Continuing your journey

• Roscoff has no railway station. The nearest is Morlaix, about 35 minutes inland by bus, and TGV services run on from there to Paris and the rest of France.
• The BreizhGo bus between Roscoff and Morlaix has a stop named simply Ferry at the terminal, so you do not have to walk into town to pick it up. It calls at Morlaix Gare SNCF. Brittany Ferries calls the line Ligne 29; BreizhGo now signs it as 929.
• Free parking in front of the Roscoff terminal for up to one week, but you must ask for a permit card at the Brittany Ferries counter inside. There is separate free long-stay parking at the entrance to Port du Bloscon, and free motorhome parking opposite vehicle check-in as well as at Sainte-Barbe (1 km) and Perharidy (2 km).
• The terminal has a café (Le Transmanche), token showers at €1.50 for six minutes, wi-fi, electric car charging and disabled toilets — considerably more than Ringaskiddy offers.
• If your dates fall in the winter gap, the year-round direct option is Rosslare to Cherbourg, which Brittany Ferries runs four times a week through the winter. Cork has no Spanish service to fall back on either: Brittany Ferries dropped Cork–Santander after the two-year trial it opened in 2018, when freight volumes did not hold up, and moved the route to Rosslare.

Worth knowing

Good to know before you sail