Glass works

The National Monuments Service's description

According to Ffrench (1886, 420-23) there may have been a glass-working site at ‘Melitia’. He mentions ‘lumps of crude glass of various colours’ having been found on part of the land of a Mr. Swan ‘where some ruins had once stood, quite near his house’. In that area he uncovered ‘one large lump of olive-green glass, six inches [0.15m] long, and about three inches [0.075m] wide, and three inches [0.075m] deep, smaller lumps of light-blue, dark-blue, and of a green glass resembling black bottle-glass, also a large number of pieces of a substance which I think would be more properly described as pale-blue opaque vitreous mosaic, or enamal’. He also mentions having found ‘a portion of a glass object which may have been a round or oval bowl, or cup of green glass, about half an inch thick, and at that thickness the glass is opaque; it is glazed on the outside surface, but unglazed on the inside, and the man who gave me so much information told me that he remembered once, when digging near the site of the glass “find”, to have turned up three beads of a greenish-blue glass; each bead about three-quarters of an inch long, high in the centre, and tapering to each end; two of these beads were quite smooth, but the third had facets cut, or otherwise impressed upon it’. These ‘beads’, now lost, may be ‘kiln sweat’ which, while resembling beads, are in fact droplets of a blue glaze which coats the inside of a furnace as a result of the chemical reactions taking place while glass is being manufactured. The precise location of this possible glass-working site is unknown.

Compiled by: Jean Farrelly

Date of upload: 05 October 2012

References

Ffrench, Rev. J. F. M. 1886 On traces of an ancient glass manufactory. Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. 17, 420-23.