Mill, Bray, Co. Kerry

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Mills

Mill, Bray, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Bray Head in County Kerry, a low, boggy mound covered in rushes and mosses conceals what may be the ghost of a medieval mill.

The mound, roughly twenty metres across and just a metre high, looks at first glance like an unremarkable piece of wet ground, but a collapsed masonry wall along its south-eastern edge and a metre-deep deposit of water-laid silt tell a quieter story about managed water and grinding grain.

In 1995, a section was cut across the feature to investigate its origins. The surviving stonework was sparse, and the results were inconclusive, but a radiocarbon date returned from silt at the base of the section placed the deposit somewhere between AD 1410 and 1791, suggesting activity spanning the late medieval and early modern periods. The mound itself is thought to be a possible millpond, the kind of artificially retained body of water that would have fed a waterwheel, and a boggy spring still flows from it today. Large stones, almost certainly fallen masonry, lie on the downslope side of the wall. To the east, in the adjacent field, a narrow trench has been identified as a possible tailrace, the channel that carries water away from a mill after it has passed through the wheel. The absence of any surface silt spread along the trench is telling: the water that once ran through it was clean, fed directly from the pond rather than washed down from the hillside. Together, the pond, the trench, and the scattered stonework point strongly to a mill having stood at or very near this location, even if nothing above ground survives to confirm it.

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Pete F
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