Sally Mill, New Street, Rathangan, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Mills

Sally Mill, New Street, Rathangan, Co. Kildare

Roofless in places and slowly giving way to ivy, this six-bay corn mill at Rathangan still shows the bones of a working nineteenth-century industrial building: iron tie plates bracing a grain chute, brick-dressed window openings with the sashes rotted or missing, and a run of elliptical-headed carriageways at ground level where carts would once have passed straight through the structure to load and unload.

The T-shaped plan, with its lower two-storey return angled off to the north-west, and the mix of rubble stone walling with red brick detailing at the gables and openings, marks it out as a substantial piece of building rather than a minor outbuilding, even in its current ruined state.

The mill dates to around 1795, put up as Rathangan began to industrialise on the back of the Grand Canal's arrival in the area in the late eighteenth century. Corn milling was among the first trades to benefit from that new transport link, and the scale of the building reflects the ambitions of the period: a T-shaped block under gable-ended slate roofs, cast-iron rainwater goods along a cut-stone eaves course, and timber boarded doors set into shallow segmental arches. Some of the original mill equipment survives inside, along with fragments of the 4/4 timber sash windows and fixed-pane iron windows that once lit the working floors, giving the interior a technical interest that goes beyond the shell of the walls.

The building stands back from the road in its own grounds, reached over a footbridge to the north-east, with the site itself now part overgrown. Only the roof over the return survives in any complete form; the main pitch to the south-east is open to the sky, and sections of the walls have collapsed entirely, so what remains is best approached as a fragment of an industrial landscape rather than an intact structure.

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