Kiln - corn-drying, Corkbeg, Co. Cork

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Kilns

Kiln – corn-drying, Corkbeg, Co. Cork

Beneath what is now the southwest corner of the Whitegate Oil Refinery in Corkbeg, Co. Cork, a corn-drying kiln was quietly doing something rather clever, probably centuries ago.

It had been cut into a fulacht fia, one of those low mounds of fire-cracked stone and charred earth left behind by prehistoric cooking or industrial activity, and whoever built the kiln appears to have done so quite deliberately. The surrounding ground was marshy and low-lying, but the compacted, burnt spread of the older monument offered something firmer underfoot. In a landscape that would otherwise resist construction, an ancient ruin was being recycled as a foundation.

The feature came to light in 2007 during excavation ahead of the construction of a gas-fired electricity generating station. What the excavators found was an L-shaped cut in the ground, stone-lined, with a flat base and rounded corners. The flue, roughly 0.6 metres wide for most of its length, tapered down to around 0.3 metres at its northern end, where the probable stoke-hole would have sat. A single upright stone, positioned at the bend of the flue, may have acted as a baffle to regulate the draw of heat through the channel. The kiln extended about 3.8 metres eastward from the fulacht fia before turning north for a further 4.5 metres, cutting across the ancient monument at both ends. There were no roofing lintels in the fill, suggesting the structure had already lost its cover before it was finally backfilled. A fragment of a saddle quern, a simple flat grinding stone used to process grain, was recovered from the same fill, consistent with the agricultural function of the kiln. Just to the northwest, a curved arc of stone ran roughly parallel to the kiln's outline and may represent an even earlier iteration of the same structure, one corn-drying facility succeeding another in the same small patch of workable ground. No radiocarbon dates were available at the time of recording, so the kiln's precise age remains uncertain.

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