Camphill Woollen Mills, Collooney, Co. Sligo

The square-headed windows and their four-pane casements belong to a mid-twentieth-century refit, but the round-headed doorway, with its plinth blocks and a fanlight cut in an oddly hesitant, spooked pattern, is older, and the whole L-shaped bulk of the building still carries the proportions of an industrial structure rather than a place built for parish meetings. Step round to the north-west corner and the disguise falls away entirely: a free-standing brick chimney, tapering and capped with dressed stone, rises about eleven metres above a squat boiler house with its corrugated-iron roof and rubble stone plinion. Nothing about a parochial hall needs a chimney of that scale.

The building dates to around 1800, and what it preserves, almost by accident, is the moment industrial power in Ireland shifted from water to steam. A mill race once ran beneath the ground floor, and the carriage opening that originally let carts pass through to it survives, now spanned by later sheet-metal gates. The boiler house and chimney represent the second stage of the site's working life, added when steam supplemented or replaced the water wheel, and together the two power sources sit side by side in a single complex in a way that is not always so legible elsewhere. The mill's position also tells its own story: it stands close to Camp Hill House to the north-east, suggesting a direct relationship between milling operation and the estate or family that ran it, while a bleach green, the open ground on which woven linen was laid out to whiten in the sun, lay beyond the railway line to the west. That layout, mill, house, and bleach green in close proximity, reflects the working geography of the Irish linen and woollen trades before mechanised finishing took bleaching indoors.

Later alterations have not erased this pattern so much as overlaid it. The flat-roofed extension added around 1960 joins the original building at first-floor level while still spanning the old carriage opening below, a small but telling sign of how adaptively the site has been kept in use rather than abandoned once its industrial purpose ended. The rubble stone boundary wall, gravel forecourt, and raised car park to the south belong to this later, gentler phase of the building's history, but the boiler chimney standing apart to the north-west remains the clearest marker of what the place once was.