Wind Mill, Moortown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Kilns
At Moortown in County Wexford, a truncated cylindrical tower sits on flat ground, its working days long finished but its walls still holding a quiet record of what grain-milling once looked like from the inside.
The tower survives only to the height of its first floor, roughly two and a half metres of stonework, yet enough remains to read the logic of the original structure with some clarity. What makes it particularly worth attention is a bottle-shaped recess cut into the north wall, widening towards its base, which was designed to allow flour sacks to bulge outward as they filled. It is a small, practical solution to a physical problem, and the kind of detail that tends to disappear when a building is repurposed or rebuilt.
The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 marks the mill as being in use at that date, which places its active life somewhere in the earlier nineteenth century, though the structure itself may be older. The tower has an external diameter of just under five metres and an internal diameter of about three, with opposing doorways on the east and west walls. Projecting steps rise from the west doorway along the inner face of the south wall, leading to the upper floors that no longer exist. The first floor was originally carried on a rebate, a shallow ledge cut into the masonry on the north side, a straightforward construction technique common in tower mills of the period. Scratched into the door jambs are three sets of initials, PP, MM, and IP, the kind of informal inscription left by workers or visitors, their identities now unknown.