Brickworks, Muckridge, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Manufacturing

Brickworks, Muckridge, Co. Cork

Cattle now shelter inside a structure that was once one of the more sophisticated pieces of industrial machinery in rural Cork.

The surviving kiln at Muckridge, south of the Tourig river in east Cork, is a Hoffman Continuous kiln, a type of industrial firing chamber that works by circulating heat through a series of interconnected chambers so that the fire never goes out and production can continue without pause. This particular example, erected in 1895, is built from the very product it once made: brick. It measures roughly 33 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west, with twelve chambers arranged in two parallel rows separated by a thick dividing wall. A free-standing chimney, its base just over three and a half metres square, still rises at the southern end.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map already shows an area here called the Old Brick Field, which suggests industrial activity on the site well before the 1895 kiln was built, and the ground bears this out: the surrounding area is scattered with grass-covered humps and loose bricks. The works were updated in 1912 with the installation of a Buhrer Mechanical Draught Kiln, a more technologically advanced continuous kiln design, but that later structure did not survive; it was dismantled during the 1930s. What remains beyond the Hoffman kiln includes the floors of former drying sheds, a concrete base that once supported a steam engine, and the foundations of a mill house and office buildings, the skeletal plan of a small industrial complex that was clearly, for a time, a going concern.

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