Pottery works, Curraghboy, Co. Cork

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Manufacturing

Pottery works, Curraghboy, Co. Cork

At Curraghboy in County Cork, the ruins of a late nineteenth-century pottery works survive in a form unusual enough to stop anyone who stumbles across them.

The centrepiece is a bottle kiln, the kind of bulbous, chimney-topped structure once common across industrial Britain and Ireland but now rare survivals anywhere. This one retains much of its character: a circular chamber roughly four metres across internally, ringed at its base by seven arched furnace holes through which fuel would have been fed to fire the pottery within. A door opening faces north, and above it the structure rises to a saucer-domed roof with a central circular vent, topped by the distinctive bottle-neck chimney that gives this kiln type its name.

The bottle kiln sits inside, or closely alongside, a three-storey brick-built structure, roughly square at just under ten metres internally, with a gable-ended form and the remains of an eastward extension. Brick construction on this scale in rural Cork points to a deliberate industrial investment, and the late nineteenth century was a period when small regional potteries were still operating across Ireland, producing utilitarian wares before cheap imported goods made many of them unviable. Local tradition, noted by Breslin in 1991, holds that there were once more kilns at this site, suggesting Curraghboy may have been a more substantial operation than what remains today would indicate.

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