Coolfinn Saw Mills, Coolfinn, Co. Waterford

It is the most complete survivor of a small industrial complex that once processed timber for a local economy long since moved on, and it is worth pausing on that dome for a moment: kilns of this kind were built to dry timber or, in other contexts, grain or lime, using controlled heat to draw moisture out slowly, and the technical skill required to turn a brick dome over a circular chamber was not trivial. Here it survives largely intact even as the buildings around it have collapsed into rubble and corrugated iron.

The complex dates to around 1850, and its main working building, a red brick structure with a lean-to entrance bay, was extended around 1925 with a mass-concrete end range that may incorporate older fabric, then reroofed again around 1975 before falling out of use altogether. By the early twentieth century a house had been added to the site, built around 1900 in a mixture of rubble stone walling with red brick quoins at the corners, its roof laid with red clay tiles and ridge tiles, its chimneys finished with stepped brick capping and its bargeboards carved and profiled. The combination of materials, pale rubble stone, red brick, red tile, gives the house a textured, layered appearance quite different from the plainer industrial sheds nearby, and marks it out as a domestic afterthought to what was otherwise a working yard. A gateway dated 1851, its rendered piers still holding a pair of wrought iron gates complete with a foundry plaque, gives a firm date for the site's establishment and hints at the pride taken in its construction.

By 2003 the house was undergoing restoration, with replacement sash windows and other fittings installed to match the original design rather than modernise it, a rare piece of good fortune for a site where the sawmill buildings themselves have been left to decline. Where the working structures have lost their fittings, had openings blocked up, and seen their roofs patched with corrugated iron, the house's survival, tied to its reuse as a dwelling, looks likely to keep at least one corner of the complex standing for the foreseeable future. The kiln, meanwhile, sits between these two fates: too solidly built to collapse like the sheds, too specialised in function to find an obvious new use, and so it remains as found, its dome hidden under decades of growth.