Corn store, Townparks, Co. Cork

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Corn store, Townparks, Co. Cork

At the southern edge of Midleton, beside what was once Midleton House, a large industrial complex of L-shaped ranges and open yard sits quietly alongside a town better known today for its whiskey distillery.

The corn store here is not a single building but a cluster of them, arranged around a working yard, their massing and orientation speaking to a time when the storage and movement of grain was one of the more serious commercial preoccupations of a Cork market town.

The older of the two main ranges is a substantial five-storey structure of fifteen bays, built sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, with its long axis running south-west to north-east. A central hoist, the kind of mechanical lifting apparatus used to move sacked grain between floors, was fitted on both sides of the building, which gives a sense of the throughput the owners expected. A lower addition at the south-west end gives the range its L-shaped footprint. To the north of the yard stands a second, three-storey range, also L-shaped, bearing a date stone inscribed simply '1865 C'. The initial presumably records a family name or the name of a builder or owner, though the notes do not expand on this. Taken together, the two ranges represent roughly three-quarters of a century of commercial grain storage on the same site, with the later building almost certainly added to accommodate growing demand as the town and its agricultural hinterland expanded through the nineteenth century.

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Pete F
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