Inishkeen Mills, Inishkeen, Co. Monaghan

What survives is a study in contrast: rubble stone walls set against red brick surrounds to the doors and windows, with a red brick eaves course laid in header bond, meaning the bricks are turned to show their short ends, running along the long elevations. The building's bulk and its position within a wider courtyard of related structures give it a presence in the landscape that outlasts its current state of neglect.

The mill was built around 1860 as the second watermill on the Inishkeen corn and flax milling site, replacing or supplementing an earlier structure whose traces can still be picked out on the west gable and at the east end of the north elevation, where the outline of a lean-to once stood. It was built to process both corn and flax, the latter tied to the linen industry that shaped so much of nineteenth-century Ulster and north Leinster's rural economy. The complex around it, a miller's house, a second mill, and stores, formed a working courtyard between the river to the south and the millrace, an artificial channel used to divert water to power the mill wheel, to the north. Structural details point to how the building operated: oval cast-iron tie-plates at second floor level held the walls against the outward pressure of the floors, segmental-arch doorways at ground level allowed carts and materials through, and a first-floor doorway, reached by a concrete platform and metal ladder, suggests goods were once loaded and unloaded well above ground level. Ventilation gaps at ground floor height on the south elevation, and two circular vents surviving on the ridge of the remaining roof section, point to the need to keep grain and flax dry and aired within.

Inside, exposed timber beams span the ground floor ceiling, reinforced beneath by a single cross-span metal beam, a later addition perhaps needed once the timber alone could no longer be trusted to carry the load. Window treatments varied by floor, timber fittings at first floor level and vertical timber board shutters at second, while the openings at the east gable were later blocked with masonry entirely. The mill sits at the end of a short road off the main route east of Inishkeen village, reached over two small bridges, a modest approach for a building that once anchored a considerable industrial operation on the Fane.