Kilmainham Mill, Rowserstown Lane, Kilmainham Lane, Dublin 8, Co. Dublin

The older fabric is coursed rubble calp limestone with squared quoins, the kind of solid, unglamorous masonry that speaks to a period when mills were built to last centuries rather than decades. Later hands added a yellow brick block laid in English garden wall bond, a square-profile brick chimney, and rows of window openings that were altered, blocked, or reworked as the building's function changed. It has stood disused for some years now, but the same robustness that made it useful for flour and then cloth has also kept it standing, mill race, weir, and fragments of machinery still visible around it.

The building does not appear on maps from 1816, and three deeds show it passing to Patrick Dowling, a chandler, in 1822, which suggests it was newly built around that time. Dowling seems to have prospered: by 1836 the Dublin Street Directory lists him as a flour merchant, and the first edition Ordnance Survey map marks the site as a flour mill. Ownership changed again in 1867, when William Brophy took over, and the following year he installed a 30 horsepower steam engine, almost certainly the reason the chimney was added, to vent the new boiler rather than serve the waterwheel alone. Brophy returned to the building in the late 1880s with more substantial changes: he rerouted the headrace to feed a new waterwheel at the south end, fitted a cast-iron sectional aqueduct stamped "M BYRNE DUBLIN 1886", and reworked the interior with cast-iron columns bearing the same maker's mark. By 1903 the mill had left local hands entirely, bought by C.H. Bates and Company of Yorkshire, a textile firm, which fits with the building's later life as a cloth mill rather than a flour mill.

Alongside the mill stands a smaller three-bay miller's house, built around 1880, with roughcast rendered walls, red brick quoins, and sash windows glazed one-over-one at ground floor and two-over-two above, a fairly standard hierarchy for the period that put finer glazing where it would be most seen. Outbuildings extend east of the house, built in the same rubble stone and roughcast render, and stone setts still line the riverbank nearby. A rubble stone wall with a timber gate encloses the site to the north and east, marking out what was once a working complex of house, mill, and river together, rather than the isolated shell it can look like today.