As a child, my parents used to occasionally drive through the town of Kilbeggan. It’s a town I got to spend more time in when I became a student and started using a newfangled thing called public transport but I digress. Back in the day I didn’t know or care that the town had a racecourse or the remnants of an old distillery. No, what I used to look out for was a rather odd, corrugated, windowless, black building that stood on the far side of the river beside the old distillery. One that to a young child resembled nothing more than a giant jelly sweet. It was only years later when I bought a copy of the late Mary Mulvihill’s Ingenious Ireland book that I came to learn more about this mysterious building.
It turns out that this type of building was the brainchild of an Irish engineer called James Waller. During World War I, he watched soldiers camouflage their tents by daubing them with concrete. The memory of this stayed with him and when there was a shortage of steel in the 1940s and 1950s, he thought about how this old technique could be adapted to quickly and cheaply help people. He dubbed it the “Ctesiphon technique” (inspired by a 1, 600 year old archway in Iraq) and felt it could be used in developing countries and to help rebuild Europe’s bombed cities.
The way a building was constructed was this.
- A skeleton of timber arches was erected
- The arches were covered in a sheet of hessian
- Two or three layers of mortar were applied to the mortar
- The wooden arches were removed, leaving the mortar shell. It also left the “buildings” with an unusual corrugated shape.
The storehouse in Kilbeggan is the only structure in Ireland in good condition. It’s not open to the public but during the winter months, it can be clearly seen from across the river. Once summer comes, the trees in front of it do a good job of hiding it.
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