Ballitore Mills, Ballitore Hill, Co. Kildare

What draws the eye more immediately, though, is the west end, where the building rises a full six storeys and finishes in a battlemented parapet, giving the impression of a medieval tower grafted onto an industrial building. The rest of the structure keeps to four storeys, so the effect from the road is oddly lopsided, as though two buildings of different centuries and purposes had been pushed together.

The mill carries a date stone of 1834, placing its construction firmly within the wave of milling investment that reshaped many Irish villages in the decades before the Famine. It was built as a nine-bay, double-pile structure, meaning two parallel ranges of rooms under what was probably an M-profile roof, hipped or gable-ended and covered in slate, with a single-bay return extending south at the rear. The rubble stone walls, some still bearing traces of render, were finished with dressed stone quoins at the corners of the tower-like west bay, and the openings there were framed in yellow brick using a block-and-start pattern, alternating projecting and flush blocks, a decorative touch that set this end of the building apart from the plainer main block. Square-headed windows throughout relied on timber lintels rather than stone, and none of the openings were given sills, a modest economy in an otherwise carefully considered building. Today the mill stands roofless and partly collapsed, most severely at the east end, where the wall has largely fallen away, yet the west tower and much of the four-storey range remain upright enough to read the original design, down to fragments of timber fittings still lodged in a few window openings and the ground floor openings now blocked with masonry.

Approached from the road, the building announces itself well before any detail becomes legible, its silhouette rising above the rooftops with the battlemented parapet catching the light differently depending on the hour. The austerity of the north facing front, all solid wall and few openings, only makes the sudden verticality of the west tower more striking, and it remains one of the more unusual skylines produced by Ireland's nineteenth century milling boom, a working building that borrowed the visual language of a much older architecture to announce its presence in the village.