Clomantagh Mills, Clomantagh, Co. Kilkenny

Clomantagh Mills rose four or seven bays wide and seven storeys tall, a scale that spoke of serious industrial ambition rather than the modest grain-grinding operations more commonly associated with rural Ireland. By the time it was demolished in June 2005, only a shell remained, but even that fragment was recognised as an important piece of the county's industrial heritage.

The building stood on a rectangular plan, its walls built of coursed or snecked limestone, meaning the stone was laid either in regular horizontal courses or fitted together in a tighter, more irregular pattern, with cut-limestone quoins marking the corners in crisp flush blocks. The walls themselves were battered, sloping inward slightly as they rose, a technique often used to give tall masonry structures greater stability. Square-headed door openings on the west side carried block-and-start surrounds, a style of doorcase where the stone blocks alternate in size for decorative and structural effect, centred on keystones, though by the time of recording no fittings, hinges, or ironwork survived in any of the openings. The windows followed a similar pattern, with cut-limestone sills and red brick voussoirs forming the arched lines above each opening. The mill was already recorded as disused by 1900, and whatever industry once filled its seven floors had long since gone quiet, leaving the building to the slow work of ivy and lichen.

By the time it was documented, the roof, originally hipped and gabled, had disappeared entirely, and the interior had collapsed into ruin, its floors and machinery gone. The grounds around it had become unkempt, and creeper had taken hold across much of the limestone. What survived until 2005 was essentially a skeleton, walls without a roof, doorways without doors, window openings staring out at nothing, but the scale of that skeleton, seven storeys of quarried limestone standing in a rural townland, gave some sense of what industrial building on this scale once meant in the Kilkenny landscape, before the whole structure was finally taken down.