Richmond Mill, Cloondara, Co. Longford

That is the case in Cloondara, where a squared limestone rubble complex rises four storeys in places, dominating the streetscape with the kind of scale usually reserved for grain stores and warehouses rather than village buildings. Its eastern gable sits directly on the roadside, and inside, despite decades of dereliction, the remains of a timber and iron water wheel and iron machinery still occupy the block where the millrace once ran, entering the building through a round-headed arch of dressed limestone voussoirs, a stone lintel or opening curved like the top of a Roman arch rather than cut square.

The complex dates to 1771, built during a period when Irish corn milling was expanding rapidly and grain processing was becoming increasingly industrialised and profitable. It kept that function until 1827, when it was converted into a distillery producing over 10,000 gallons of whiskey a year, a substantial output for a rural County Longford operation. That chapter closed in 1843, when the mill was reconverted to corn processing, a change that coincided with Father Theobald Matthew's temperance crusade, the nationwide campaign against alcohol consumption that persuaded large numbers of Irish people to take a pledge of abstinence and put pressure on distilleries across the country. By the time of Griffith's Valuation around 1857, the property was in the hands of William Fleming, its complex of house, offices, corn mill, kilns and stores valued at £126. The water that powered it all was drawn from the Camlin River to the east, redirected through a weir before rejoining the river to the west, an engineered diversion typical of mill sites that needed a controlled, steady flow rather than a river's natural current. A former mill manager's house remains attached to the northwest elevation, a reminder that a complex of this scale required someone resident on site to oversee its operations. The roofs, once pitched and hipped with a cut stone eaves course, have collapsed, and cast-iron tie-bars remain visible in the rubble limestone walls, evidence of the structural reinforcement such large, multi-storey industrial buildings often needed to keep their walls from bowing outward under the weight of machinery and stored grain.