Streamstown House, Streamstown or Barratrough, Co. Galway

This is no architectural accident but a practical response to sloping ground, a common trick in mill design where builders let the fall of the site do some of the work of the walls. Built around 1780 as a corn mill, the building is roughcast rubble limestone with neat squared quoins at the corners, and its six bays give it a long, deliberate presence on the bay it takes its name from.

Streamstown Bay itself had a reputation in the eighteenth century as a smuggling coast, and the money that came with that illicit trade seems to have fed into the prosperity that made a mill of this scale worthwhile. It operated into the mid-nineteenth century, grinding corn for a hinterland that depended on it, before milling here, as in so many small Irish ports, faded out. The building's working history is legible in its openings: a loading bay at attic level on the east gable, complete with the stone niche that once held a pulley for hauling sacks up from the yard, and a stack of further loading bays rising through the first, second and third floors above it, each with its own lintel arrangement, timber for the upper ones, brick voussoirs and a concrete lintel lower down, hinting at repairs and changes made over the decades. Two camber-arch carriage entrances, one with stone voussoirs and the other with a rubbed red-brick arch, let carts pull in from both the east and west ends of the south front, while the main door on the road side has an arch of red-brick voussoirs above a battened timber door that still survives.

Inside, the mill has kept more of its working fabric than its derelict exterior might suggest. Original timber floors, beams and support posts remain intact, giving a sense of the internal volume needed to house milling machinery on multiple levels. Long after the last grain was ground here, the ground floor found a second life as a stable, and the timber mangers and feed stalls installed for that purpose are still in place, a reminder that buildings rarely retire cleanly from use in the Irish countryside; they simply get put to whatever job comes next. Today it stands empty of both corn and horses, used only as a farm store, but its walls and roofline still read clearly as industrial, a quiet marker of the working life that once animated this stretch of the bay.