Corn Mill, Carrigboy By.), Co. Cork

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Mills

Corn Mill, Carrigboy By.), Co. Cork

A pair of French Burr millstones, each just over a metre and a third in diameter, sit inside a roofless shell on the western bank of the Four Mile Water river near Durrus in west Cork.

The building that once housed them is a single-storey rectangular structure, roughly ten metres by six and three-quarter metres internally, and it has seen better days: the fabric is much disturbed, and the turbine that once drove the whole operation has been shifted from its original position on the eastern wall and now lies somewhere close by, detached and idle.

French Burr stones were prized in the milling trade for their hardness and their capacity to grind without overheating the grain. They were not cut from a single block but assembled from pieces of freshwater quarzite quarried near Paris, bound together with iron bands, and exported widely across Europe and beyond during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their presence here, fed by a concrete launder, which is a channel designed to direct water onto the wheel or turbine, suggests a mill that was at some point properly equipped and commercially serious, even if the surrounding structure now gives little indication of that former function. The shift from traditional waterwheel to turbine technology, which became common in Irish mills during the later nineteenth century, points to a building that was updated rather than simply abandoned at some point in its working life.

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