Lacken Mills, Dublin Road, Kilkenny, Co. Kilkenny

It is the kind of building that photographs well precisely because it has been allowed to fail slowly rather than being demolished outright, and the result, on its bend of the River Nore, has the look of a deliberately Romantic ruin even though its decline was entirely accidental.

Milling on this stretch of the Nore goes back further than the standing building itself; a mill is recorded on the site as early as the fourteenth century, making this one link in a long chain of industrial use rather than a single episode. The structure now visible dates to 1774, built as a corn mill, and it was still working as a flour mill before 1840. It did not simply run down quietly after that: in 1876 it was extensively reconstructed, a substantial vote of confidence in the building's continued usefulness, and milling carried on for another seventy years before the mill finally closed in 1946. What remains today is a shell of random rubble limestone, with dressed limestone at the corners, panels of red brick laid in an irregular bond at the gables, and a course of yellow brick running along the eaves where the roofline used to sit. The window openings are square headed but set within camber headed recesses, a construction detail where the arch takes the load above a flatter opening, and traces of red brick voussoirs, the wedge shaped bricks that form the arch, survive around both the windows and the door openings, though the sills and timber fittings that once completed them are largely gone.

Set back from the road on its own grounds on the riverbank, the mill's scale is best appreciated from a distance, where the ten-bay front and the sheer height of four storeys plus attic register against the water and the surrounding land. Kilkenny's industrial past is not always so legible in a single standing structure, and here the building's fall into ruin, rather than its demolition or wholesale conversion, is what allows its original proportions and construction to be read so directly.