Wind Mill Stump, Castletown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Kilns
On a broad, low hill near Castletown in County Wexford, there once stood a windmill whose stump was still visible enough in 1839 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map.
Today nothing remains. What survives instead is a paper trail, thin but telling, that runs from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, tracking a structure that was already old before anyone thought to measure it carefully.
The windmill's first appearance in the documentary record comes from the Down Survey of 1656 to 1658, the ambitious Cromwellian mapping project that catalogued land ownership across Ireland in the aftermath of conquest. Both the barony map of Forth and the parish map of Carne mark a windmill at Castletown, and the land at that point was associated with Nicholas Codd, who had owned the property in 1640. The Codd family were among the Old English Catholic gentry of County Wexford, and their estates were subject to the dispossessions that followed the Cromwellian settlement. By 1712, the property, referred to in documents under the older placename Mogerdocke, had passed out of Codd hands entirely. A sale of that year records a mill among the assets transferred to Colonel Thomas Palliser of Great Island. Whether the windmill was still working at that point, or had already begun its decline into a stump, the record does not say. By the time the Ordnance Survey cartographers came through in the 1830s, only the base remained, sitting on its low hill and apparently recognisable enough to mark but not substantial enough to describe further. It has since disappeared altogether.