The idea was simple enough: rather than cart heavy loads of brick along roads, the company suspended them on a cable running cross-country. It is the kind of industrial ingenuity that rarely makes it into general histories, and the kind of infrastructure that tends to vanish almost entirely once the business that built it closes. Almost entirely, but not quite.

The brickworks at Ballinphelic had been operating in some form before the Cork Brick Manufacturing Company formalised the site in the late nineteenth century. The earlier operation was unmechanised; the later company brought a more industrial scale to it, as reported in The Irish Builder in March 1902. By then the complex was substantial enough to appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that year. It did not last long in that form. By 1913, according to the Cork Examiner, the works had closed. What survived is fragmentary: grass-covered foundations where most of the buildings once stood, a single range of brick-built structures on the western side, and those ropeway support piers still scattered across the landscape between here and Ballinhassig. The standing structures include a single-storey building with a low brick arch set into the north interior wall, flanked by doors opening into a small lean-to, roughly 2.75 metres long and 2.4 metres wide, which local tradition identifies as the drying house where green bricks were cured before firing. Among the details that survived alongside the masonry: ornate ceramic tiles, brick entrance piers, and a hand bellows.

The ropeway piers are perhaps the most quietly arresting remnant. An aerial ropeway, essentially a cable-car system for cargo rather than passengers, would have been a notable piece of engineering for rural Cork at the turn of the twentieth century. That some of its supports are still standing in the fields between Ballinphelic and Ballinhassig, outlasting the brickworks, the railway, and the company that built the whole arrangement, gives the site an oddly elegiac quality that the grass-covered foundations alone could not quite manage.