Pottery works, Muckridge, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Manufacturing

Pottery works, Muckridge, Co. Cork

Tucked into the townland of Muckridge in east Cork, and known locally as Smyth's Pottery Works, this small industrial complex is an unusually complete survival of a rural ceramic industry that has largely vanished from the Irish landscape.

At its centre stands a circular brick-built bottle kiln, so called because its tall chimney stack and swelling base give it the profile of an inverted bottle. The kiln, just under four metres in internal diameter, retains eight arched furnace holes set around its perimeter, a door opening to the east, a saucer-domed roof with a central vent, and the bottle-neck chimney rising above it all. The enclosing square structure, roughly eight and a half metres on each side, still stands roofless around it.

The main kiln dates from the late nineteenth century, but the site did not stop evolving there. Stretching northward from the enclosing structure is a long roofless building, 34 metres in length and just over six metres wide, which would have served the working needs of the pottery. To the south of this lies a second kiln, a Habla Intermittent kiln measuring 24 metres east to west and 7 metres north to south, built in 1930. An intermittent kiln is one that is fired, loaded, allowed to cool, and then emptied in repeated cycles, as distinct from the continuous kilns that became standard in larger industrial operations. The presence of this later addition suggests that Smyth's Pottery Works remained in active use well into the twentieth century, adapting its technology as the decades passed.

The complex sits to the north-west of Heathfield Towers, a nearby country house, and is described as heavily overgrown. Visitors should expect dense vegetation obscuring much of the fabric, though the scale of the bottle kiln and the outlying structures makes the site difficult to miss entirely once approached closely.

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