Abymill Theatre, Abbeyville, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

This was built as a flour mill in 1791, and it still looks the part: brick voussoirs curve over segmental-arch windows, limestone quoins sharpen the corners, and a carved stone doorcase carries a keystone dated 1847, initialled by whoever added it more than half a century after the mill first opened. The building has since been converted for use as a theatre, but the conversion has been sympathetic enough that the industrial bones remain plainly visible under the new purpose.

The date discrepancy between the 1791 fabric and the 1847 keystone suggests the mill was altered or extended as milling technology and demand changed through the nineteenth century, a common pattern for flour mills of this size, which needed to keep pace with new machinery and larger throughput. Additions followed into the twentieth century, including a flat-roofed extension to the north and a lower pitched-roof range to the south, both recessed enough not to compete with the original block. Cast-iron rainwater goods, a limestone eaves course and brick chimneystacks all point to a building that was built to last and maintained rather than left to decline once milling stopped. French burr millstones remain on site, a physical trace of the building's working life; burr millstones, quarried in sections from a hard, cellular limestone in the Paris basin and pieced together like a jigsaw, were long prized across Europe for grinding flour because the texture of the stone made for a particularly fine, even grind.

Look closely at the doorcase on arrival: the chamfered limestone surround and its dated keystone are the clearest surviving link to the mill's nineteenth-century phase, and worth pausing over before going inside to whatever is playing on the stage that has replaced the grinding floor.