Kiln - lime, Pollardstown, Co. Cork

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Kiln – lime, Pollardstown, Co. Cork

Set into a hillside in Pollardstown in north County Cork, this lime kiln survives in enough detail to read almost like a piece of industrial archaeology caught mid-sentence.

The front wall, roughly four metres high and seven and a half metres wide, faces east and is built in random rubble, the kind of construction where the builder worked with whatever stone lay to hand rather than cut or coursed material. Behind it, stone-faced side walls hold in an earthen core, a typical arrangement that allowed the surrounding ground to act as insulation during firing. The arched recess at the base, where the burned lime was raked out, still measures over a metre in height and more than two metres wide, with sloping slabs surviving at its rear.

A lime kiln was a functional necessity on any improving farm from the seventeenth century onwards. Limestone or shell was packed into the funnel from above, alternated with fuel, and burned over many hours to produce quicklime, which was then spread on acidic land to sweeten the soil or used in building mortars. Here, the funnel is sandstone-lined and partially infilled, with a diameter of two metres. The kiln was built against the slope deliberately so that carts or panniers could approach from the old trackway that runs along the rear, tipping material directly down into the funnel without the need for lifting. That ramp or bank has since been removed, leaving the rear of the structure sitting only about a metre above ground level, which gives it a slightly truncated appearance from behind, as though the landscape has quietly lowered itself around it.

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