Water mill - vertical-wheeled, Noughaval, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Mills

Water mill – vertical-wheeled, Noughaval, Co. Westmeath

A corn mill on the bank of the Tang River in County Westmeath carries a cartographic pedigree stretching back more than three and a half centuries.

What makes the site quietly remarkable is the degree to which its location appears to have remained constant across that span of time, traceable through two very different mapping traditions separated by centuries.

The evidence rests on a comparison between the current Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which marks a corn mill at this spot, and the Down Survey map of Kilkenny West barony dated to 1659. The Down Survey was a massive mid-seventeenth-century land mapping project undertaken in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, intended to apportion confiscated lands and record what was on them. On the 1659 map, the site is noted simply as 'a mill', accompanied by a small depiction of a vertical waterwheel standing on the river's edge. A vertical waterwheel, as distinct from a horizontal one, is the more familiar mill type, with the wheel set upright and turned by water flowing against or beneath its paddles. The close correspondence between that early annotation and the position of the corn mill on later maps suggests this stretch of the Tang River has been a milling site for at least as long as that seventeenth-century survey was drawn.

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