Kiln - lime, Farranlaheshery, Co. Cork

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Kilns

Kiln – lime, Farranlaheshery, Co. Cork

Beside a road in Farranlaheshery, a squat mass of random-rubble limestone rises to around five metres, its top smothered in vegetation, the ramp that once led up to its mouth long since gone.

This is a lime kiln, a structure once common enough across rural Ireland but now easily overlooked or mistaken for a collapsed field wall. Lime kilns worked by burning limestone at high temperatures to produce quicklime, which farmers spread on acidic soil or builders mixed into mortar. What makes this particular example worth a second glance is the specificity of its probable purpose: it was most likely built not to serve a farm, but to supply a railway.

The Fermoy to Mitchelstown railway line was constructed in 1891, and a tall single-arched bridge still stands to the north-east of the kiln site. Building that kind of masonry on any scale consumed lime in quantity, and a temporary kiln erected close to the works would have been a practical solution, producing mortar material on site rather than carting it from a distance. The kiln's front elevation, facing north-west, measures roughly 9.2 metres wide and features a brick-arched recess just over two metres high and two metres wide, braced at the rear with iron bars. That combination of limestone rubble construction with brick detailing and iron reinforcement is consistent with mid-to-late Victorian engineering work. The line itself, part of a network of rural branch lines that briefly stitched together small Cork towns, closed in 1953, leaving the bridge and this roadside kiln as the most tangible traces of a railway that few people now remember.

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