Maltings, Ballynacorra, Co. Cork

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Maltings, Ballynacorra, Co. Cork

At Ballynacorra in East Cork, a substantial maltings complex has been quietly converting barley into malt for the better part of two centuries, and it is still doing so.

The buildings appeared on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 labelled simply as a 'Store', were recorded as a 'Malt House' by 1933, and have never stopped functioning. That kind of unbroken continuity is relatively rare in industrial heritage, where so many comparable sites now survive only as roofless shells or converted apartments.

The heart of the complex is a late nineteenth-century drying store, five storeys tall and double-gable-ended, its windows dressed in brick and cement. Malting requires the drying of germinated barley, and kilns are central to that process; here the kiln runs on an east-west axis attached to the south of the main block, and local sources confirm it is now fired by anthracite and fitted with steel kiln tiles. The east side of the drying and steeping house, where the steel steeps sit, is largely hidden behind a tall modern elevator structure, while a hoist survives in the north gable on the west side. Projecting eastward from the drying house is a three-storey, twelve-bay structure with brick detailing around the window and door openings; attached to its north is another three-storey block with a low kiln at the west end, said to have a ceramic tiled floor. At the northwest corner of the drying house stands a four-storey, seven-bay building known as the seed store, with a low gabled projection to the north. Two further maltings lie to the west of the complex. Perhaps the most striking detail is that the buildings on the east side of the site are still used for Government experimental trials, a programme established in the early 1800s, meaning that research into malting barley has been running here continuously for over two hundred years.

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