Kiln - lime, Ballinaspig Beg, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Kilns
Tucked into a sloped bank within a public park in Ballinaspig Beg, on the western outskirts of Cork city, is a lime kiln that most people walking past it would struggle to identify at all.
Lime kilns were industrial structures used to burn limestone at high temperatures, producing quicklime that farmers spread on fields to improve acidic soils, and that builders mixed into mortar and plaster. This one, west-facing and built into the natural gradient of the ground, has an arched recess measuring roughly 1.6 metres high and just over 2 metres wide, with a sloping slab at the rear and a stoking hole through which fuel was fed to maintain the burn. At some point the structure was enlarged, with a brick arch extending the recess forward by around 1.5 metres and the front face of the whole structure pushed further out still. A brick-lined funnel, about 2.2 metres in diameter, sits at the top, now almost completely filled in, and the remains of a low wall enclose that upper section. Lean-to side walls flank the front of the kiln, suggesting a more substantial working complex once stood here.
The kiln sits on what was formerly the demesne of Bishopstown House, the managed estate lands that would have surrounded a substantial country residence. Agricultural and industrial infrastructure of this kind was common on such demesnes, where lime production served both the estate's own farming operations and potentially supplied neighbouring tenants or smallholders. The survival of the structure in a public park means it has been spared the demolition that cleared most of the surrounding demesne character, though the funnel's near-total infilling and the partial collapse of the enclosing wall show that it has not escaped the slow work of time entirely.