Windmill, Pollalaher, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Kilns
Some places survive only as a name on a map, and this site in County Roscommon is about as close to pure absence as a listed structure can get.
There is nothing to see at ground level. Whatever once stood here, a windmill recorded on a seventeenth-century survey, has long since vanished, and local memory holds only that a circular stone structure was removed some years ago, leaving the ridgeline bare.
The earliest record of the mill comes from the Strafford map of around 1636, a survey commissioned under Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, then Lord Deputy of Ireland, as part of an effort to establish land titles in Connacht. The map places the windmill at a location named Crosreganen, lying between two neighbouring townlands identified as Cronager and Tobberbridy, a rendering confirmed by the historian R.C. Simington in 1949. The choice of location makes practical sense: the mill sat at the southern end of a north-south ridge, a position that would have caught prevailing winds and made it visible across the surrounding countryside. Tower windmills of this period were typically built from local stone in a cylindrical form, tapering slightly toward the cap, and it is likely the circular stone structure recalled in local tradition was the base or lower courses of just such a tower. At some point, that material was cleared away or reused, as happened to countless rural structures when their original function was lost.