Robe Villa, High Street, Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo

Each floor's window openings shrink slightly from the one below, so that the building tapers visually even though its rectangular plan and walls stay true to their lines all the way up. It is a deliberate trick of proportion rather than an accident of decay, and it gives the structure a curiously graduated, almost telescoping profile against the sky, four bays wide on its long east front, with two full-height bays closing off each end.

The mill was already standing in 1818, when the painter James Arthur O'Connor, a Dublin-born landscape artist working in the early nineteenth century, committed it to canvas as "The Mill, Ballinrobe". What survives on the ground today is not quite that same building; the compact rectilinear form and the diminishing window pattern suggest a structure that was altered and enlarged after O'Connor painted it, part of the ordinary process by which working mills were "improved" as milling technology and demand changed through the nineteenth century. Its working life ended in 1884, when it was decommissioned, and it has stood empty since, its roof gone entirely and no trace left of the rainwater goods that would once have run along its cut-limestone eaves.

What remains is built of roughcast coursed limestone, with quoins, the dressed stones reinforcing each corner, cut and tooled to a drag-edged finish, and window surrounds of concealed tooled limestone ashlar. Fragments of the original timber sash windows still cling to some openings, part of their sash boxes exposed to the weather, in a pattern of ten panes over fifteen on the lower floors and ten over ten higher up. Ivy has taken parts of the roofline, and the grounds around the mill have gone to seed, but the elementary mass of the building, its walls, its silhouette, its slow-narrowing rhythm of windows, has held together, standing over the river it once depended on with a bearing that is more forlorn than picturesque.