Kiln - lime, Longueville, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Kilns
At some point in the nineteenth century, someone built a small house on top of a lime kiln.
Not beside it, not incorporating it into a wall, but directly on top of it, a one-storey, three-bay vernacular dwelling with a hipped corrugated iron roof sitting over the old industrial structure as though the kiln were simply a convenient plinth. By the time anyone formally recorded the arrangement, the kiln's upper section was entirely hidden beneath the house's floor, and the two had become a single puzzling object.
A lime kiln is a structure used to burn limestone at high temperatures, producing quicklime for use in agriculture and construction. This particular example at Longueville in North Cork was already marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, noted as a rectangular structure immediately north of a canal lock. Its walls were built in random rubble, the rough-and-ready method of laying uncut stone that characterises a great deal of functional rural building in Ireland. The southern front elevation retained a lintelled corbelled recess, a shallow arched opening measuring roughly one and a half metres high, just over two metres wide, and two and a half metres deep, where the kiln would have been loaded and tended. Its proximity to the canal lock suggests it was part of the same working infrastructure, possibly serving traffic moving along the waterway and the agricultural estates nearby. The house built on top of it was presumably also connected to that canal economy in some way, though the precise relationship was never formally established.
Both structures have since been demolished. Whatever the logic was behind stacking a dwelling on an industrial kiln, and whatever work the canal lock and its neighbouring buildings once supported, the site at Longueville now holds only the ground where they stood.