Cloth Mill, Poulacurry, Co. Cork

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Mills

Cloth Mill, Poulacurry, Co. Cork

A date plaque reading 1796 is set into the weatherslated south elevation of a four-storey mill on the western bank of the Glashaboy river, about half a kilometre north of Glanmire.

That small stone detail anchors what is otherwise a quietly puzzling complex: a building recorded as a cloth mill on one Ordnance Survey map and as a beetling mill on the next. Beetling, for those unfamiliar with the term, was a finishing process applied to linen or other woven cloth, in which heavy wooden hammers mechanically pounded the fabric to produce a smooth, lustrous surface. The shift in name between the 1842 and 1902 six-inch OS maps suggests either a change in function or simply a more precise description of what the machinery was actually doing.

The complex is L-shaped and was built in two distinct phases. The earlier element, dated 1796, runs north to south and rises four storeys with an attic, its window openings formed from stone arches. At some point a second four-storey mill of seven bays was added at right angles, running east to west, with brick-surround windows and a wheel-pit along the east wall, its roof gabled to the west and half-hipped to the east. A smaller mill to the north followed in the mid to late nineteenth century, distinguished by decorated bargeboards along its gable ends and its own wheel-pit. Two millraces drew water southward from a mill pond to the north, each feeding one of the mills in turn. Local information records that a turbine was installed in 1929, modernising the water-power arrangement without abandoning it entirely. The site later served as a saw-mill, and by the time of survey was operating as a furniture factory, meaning the bones of an eighteenth-century textile enterprise have been kept in use across more than two centuries by simply adapting what was already there.

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