Bakery, Kilcash, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Food & Drink
A bulging, semicircular protrusion pushing out from the east wall of a ruined sandstone building near Kilcash tower house is the most immediately legible clue to what this structure once was.
That rounded form is a wall oven, brick-lined and substantial, measuring nearly three metres across its external face. It is the kind of feature that tends to survive when everything else has gone, simply because its mass resists collapse, and here it has outlasted most of the building it served.
The bakehouse formed part of a small domestic cluster associated with a 17th-century house that once stood roughly sixty metres to the west-southwest, with Kilcash tower house another fifty metres or so to the southwest. Tower houses were the fortified residences of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords, and the presence of a dedicated bakehouse in their vicinity reflects the scale of household provisioning that a substantial establishment required. The building itself was single-storey with a high attic, constructed of sandstone rubble in rough courses, with a deep recess cut into the gable wall to carry the roof timbers. Of that structure, only the east gable and the full length of the north wall still stand to any meaningful height, the gable reaching around five and a half metres with a large rectangular window surviving at attic level. The wall oven is the most technically interesting survival. It was built with a double skin, and the inner skin retains a well-preserved rough limestone harl on its outer face, a plastered render that would have helped retain and regulate heat. Only patches of this harl survive on the outer skin, which may have been added at a later date, perhaps as a repair or reinforcement after the original construction.