B. Yeats. Less remarked upon is the fact that the town once had its own gasworks, a reminder that even modest Irish towns invested, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the infrastructure of manufactured gas.

Town gasworks of this kind were a common feature of Victorian urban life across Ireland and Britain. They typically produced coal gas by heating coal in sealed retorts, then purifying and storing the resulting gas in large cylindrical holders before distributing it through underground mains to light streets, shops, and homes. For a town the size of Gort, the presence of such a facility points to a period of relative civic ambition, when local commissioners or town authorities judged gas lighting a worthwhile investment. Similar small-scale works served dozens of Irish county towns from the mid-nineteenth century onward, many of them eventually absorbed into or closed down by larger regional schemes during the twentieth century.

The physical remnants of such works, where they survive, tend to be easy to overlook: a brick retort house, the circular footprint of a gasholder, perhaps a boundary wall. Whether any structure remains on the Gort site is not easily established from the current record, which makes the gasworks an intriguing gap in the documented picture of the town's industrial past.