Ballindrait Windmill, Ballindrait, Co. Donegal

It has stood unused since 1932, its render mostly gone, its sails long vanished, yet it still dominates the skyline between Ballindrait and Lifford, visible for miles across a county where windmills were never common. Most of Donegal's grain was ground by water in the nineteenth century; an 1840 inventory of windmills in Ireland counted only three in the entire county. This one is not only rare for its location but unusually late in date, and it ranks among the largest surviving windmills of its type in Ireland.

The building's proportions, tapering from a broad base to a narrower head, mark it out as a nineteenth century structure; earlier windmills of the eighteenth century tended to have straight, vertical walls. A cut stone plaque at second stage level, carved in diamond form, gives a date of 1874(?) and names Charles Robinson(?) as builder. A Charles Robinson farming at Murlough appears in Slater's Directory of 1881, and is thought to be the same man. The plaque also carries the square and divider symbol of Freemasonry, suggesting the builder or owner belonged to that fraternity. An archival photograph shows the tower in working order, rendered and topped with a rotating timber mechanism carrying six sails of timber and canvas, balanced by a smaller stabilising fan on the opposite side, the whole assembly turned by ropes reaching down to a timber gantry at third stage level, remnants of which survive as projecting stone supports around the tower. The design is thought to derive from windmills of southern France, apparently making it unique in Ireland. Around the tower once stood a working complex: outbuildings with slate roofs and rendered rubble walls, a tall brick chimney to the east, and a two-storey house with a gabled front to the west, all now gone. Ownership passed after Robinson's death to a relative, John Snodgrass. The mill worked until 1932, and local memory holds that its sail mechanism was finally torn off by a storm in the 1960s.

Approached today along a laneway south of Ballindrait, the tower stands within a working farmyard, hemmed in by a modern house and altered outbuildings, its brick-infilled ground floor opening and red brick window surrounds still visible against the rubble stone. Millstones remain inside at second stage level, a quiet survival of the machinery that once processed grain here. The windows have lost their fittings, and the structure is ruinous, but the massing and the tapering silhouette still read clearly from the surrounding fields, a reminder that even in a county built on water power, someone once gambled on the wind.