Publication:

Industrial Heritage of County Cork

    Full details

    Authors & editors

    Publisher Heritage Unit of Cork County Council
    Year of publication 2019 -
    Languages

    Medium Digital
    Note: Copyright restrictions mean the attachment below only contains part of the publication. The full document is available for inspection at the Mills Archive Research and Education Centre.
    Edition1
    Topics

    Industrial history & industrial archaeology

    Tags

    Scope & contentIntroduction

    Industry can be defined as an economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and the manufacturing of goods in specialised buildings or factories. Essentially it is the production; distribution and consumption of products and services. The manufacturing process usually entailed machinery, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, developed into a sophisticated and complex system.

    The focus of this publication is the Industrial heritage of this period and it seeks to highlight the nature and wealth of industrial heritage throughout the County of Cork from this time.

    The principal subject matter of this book concerns the industrial heritage of County Cork in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which as noted was relatively small in scale relative to what was happening throughout most of Europe. Nonetheless, some essential physical characteristics of industrial buildings of the period of European industrialization are evident in the built environment of the county’s industries during this period. These include mechanization, the centralization of production in special buildings or factories, the adoption of advanced forms of vertical waterwheels, new prime movers such as steam engines and water turbines, the creation of workers’ settlements/villages and the construction of modern transport networks.

    But as we shall see in later chapters, not all industries were conducted in centralized locations, principally because rural industries existed to meet the needs of dispersed, agricultural communities and small urban centres. Their scale of production,
    therefore, was designed to cater for smaller communities on a regular basis, as in the case of rural corn mills, or seasonally, as was the case in the production of textiles such as linen or wool, or the burning of lime for fertiliser.

    Divisions within this publication

    • 1: Introduction
    • 2: Origins of Industry in County Cork
    • 3: Industrial energy and technology
    • 4: Extractive and manufacturing industries
    • 5: Industrial Infrastructure
    • 6: The Architecture of Industry
    • 7: Timeline of Key Events
    • 8: 30 Sites of Industry in County Cork
    • 9: Protecting Our Industrial Heritage
    • 10: Conclusion
    • 11: Appendix (Glossary of Industrial Terms; Poetry and Photospread)
    • 12: References
    • 13: Index

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