The Malthouse, Main Street, Castlebellingham, Co. Louth

The rest of the building is plain, brick and slate, no-nonsense industrial fabric, yet someone troubled to dress the entrance in cut limestone as though the flour trade deserved a proper front door. The mismatch between austere walls and ornamental threshold is the sort of detail that makes you stop and look twice, and it survives even though the opening it frames has long since been sealed.

The building carries the date 1866 on a stone set into its Flemish bond brickwork, brick laid in alternating headers and stretchers along each course, a technique favoured for its strength and its neat chequered appearance. It stands at a corner site, L-shaped in plan with a later extension to the south and a return wing running east, and was built with the working life of a mill in mind: a segmental-headed carriage arch for cart access, a separate door positioned at the site of a weigh bridge, where loads would once have been checked, and wrought-iron ties fixed with cast-iron pattress plates, decorative fittings that spread the load of the tie rods across the wall face and, in doing so, add a further ornamental touch to an otherwise functional structure. The mill operated as such until around 1970, when it closed, leaving the building disused but largely intact.

Much of what a visitor can still make out belongs to that working past rather than to any later use. The front windows facing the green have been blocked, though their tooled limestone sills remain, and to the rear, timber window frames survive in fragmentary form. The double gates at the carriage arch, painted timber, vertically sheeted, and fitted with a smaller wicket gate for foot traffic, still hang in their brick-arched opening. Because the building fronts directly onto the village green, its silhouette, and that one incongruous stone doorway, form part of the everyday view for anyone passing through the centre of Castlebellingham.