Celbridge Mills, Main Street, Celbridge, Co. Kildare

This was not a modest local operation but an industrial composition on the scale of a small factory town, its elongated rectilinear plan and the strict uniformity of window openings on every floor speaking to a single, unified design rather than piecemeal expansion. The high pitched roof, slate with clay ridge tiles and stepped coping at the gables, gives the whole structure a severe, almost institutional silhouette, softened only by the warm red brick used in header bond along the eaves and in the voussoirs framing the casement windows, set against coursed rubble limestone walls finished with hammered limestone quoins at the corners.

The mill was built in 1805 by Laurence Atkinson, a Yorkshireman whose choice of Celbridge for a woollen manufactory reflected the water power available on the site: a nineteenth-century account describes a wheel of 200 horsepower driving all the machinery needed for woollen production in its various branches. What is most telling about the building's later life is its extraordinary adaptability. Under Giles Shaw it turned from wool to flax and flour between 1840 and 1879. It then passed briefly, from 1903 to 1906, into the hands of the American-born William Calendar, who used it to produce paper from peat, an unusual industrial experiment for its time and place. Thomas Copperton of the Leinster Hand Weaving Company, a firm established in 1834, ran it as a hand-weaving concern for a few years in the 1930s, after which Barney Reynolds converted it to the manufacture of coats and dresses between 1939 and 1953. Its final industrial incarnation came under Navan Carpets, established in 1938, which produced carpets here from 1956 until the mill finally closed in 1982.

That closure was not the end of the building. It was renovated in 1985 to accommodate a new use, a fate common to large mill buildings once their original industrial purpose has passed, and one that has preserved the structure's essential form even as its function inside has changed once again. The cast-iron rainwater goods and downpipes, along with the limestone walling now part repointed, remain visible reminders of the building's early nineteenth-century fabric, standing within grounds it shares with neighbouring development.