Mill - fulling, Inchinagotagh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Mills
On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, a cluster of buildings at a bend in the Saivnose river in Inchinagotagh, County Cork, is labelled simply "Tuck Mill", which is an older term for a fulling mill, a water-powered facility used to clean and thicken woollen cloth by beating it repeatedly in water.
The name alone signals that what survives here is not merely a ruined farm building but the remnant of a small industrial operation that once served the cloth-making economy of rural West Cork.
The main structure is three storeys tall with a half-hipped roof, meaning the upper portion of each gable slopes inward rather than rising to a full point, a form that offers some structural economy and weather resistance. Along its northern elevation runs a wheel pit some 4.4 metres wide, fed by a head race, the channel that diverts water from the river to drive the wheel. On the head race side of that pit sits an irregular raised platform, roughly 9.5 metres by 9 metres and about 1.2 metres high, which would have managed the flow and approach of water. To the south, sharing the same head race platform, is a smaller single-storey structure with gabled ends and a chimney set into its northern gable; this building has its own narrower wheel pit, 1.5 metres wide, adjoining the larger one. The presence of two wheel pits of quite different sizes suggests the complex handled more than one process or operated machinery of different scales at the same time. Both structures are now used as farm buildings, which has ensured their survival even as their original industrial function has long since ceased.