Mill, Rathmichael, Co. Dublin

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Mill, Rathmichael, Co. Dublin

A granite millstone with an oblong hollow cut into a large flat block turned up in a field near Rathmichael sometime before the end of the nineteenth century, and then, in a sense, vanished again.

It has never been precisely located, and what little is known about it rests almost entirely on a single line in a survey carried out over a century ago. That combination, a real artefact recorded by a reliable observer, yet effectively lost to the landscape, gives the site an odd status: it is documented but not found, present in the literature but absent from any map.

The record comes from T. J. Westropp, who noted the stone in 1894, describing it as a millstone bearing an oblong hollow set into a large flat block of granite. Westropp was a prolific recorder of Irish antiquities, and his observation places the stone in a field near the road to the south-east of the ecclesiastical remains at Rathmichael. Those remains, a ruined early medieval church, lie on the eastern slopes of Carrickgollogan, the hill that rises above the south Dublin coastline toward the border with Wicklow. The millstone itself, if it is indeed a millstone in the early sense, would represent the kind of small-scale grain processing associated with the monastic or early Christian communities that occupied sites like Rathmichael. Simple rotary or saddle querns, stone tools used to grind grain by hand or with basic mechanical assistance, were common features of such settlements, and a granite block with a worked hollow fits broadly within that tradition.

For anyone interested in visiting the wider Rathmichael area, the ruined church is the more tangible point of reference. The site sits on the eastern slopes of Carrickgollogan, accessible from the road network south of Shankill in south County Dublin. The millstone itself offers no guaranteed encounter; the notes compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy confirm it has not been precisely located, so a visit to the surrounding fields is more an act of informed curiosity than a reliable find. The granite of Carrickgollogan is distinctive and heavy-grained, and any large flat block encountered near the old road south-east of the church might warrant a second look, though positive identification would need proper archaeological assessment rather than fieldwork guesswork.

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Rathmichael, Co. Dublin
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