Cloghabreedy Mill, Cloghabreedy, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Mills
Some sites earn their place in the historical record precisely because they no longer exist.
On the western bank of a small stream that feeds into the River Suir, in County Tipperary, there is a large field beside some old buildings and a hay barn where a mill once stood. By the late 1990s it had been levelled, and nothing now remains above ground.
The site has a longer history than its recent disappearance might suggest. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land census carried out under Cromwellian administration, records both a corn mill and a tucking mill at Cloghabreedy. A tucking mill, also known as a fulling mill, was used to clean and thicken freshly woven woollen cloth by pounding it in water, a process central to the textile trade in early modern Ireland. The presence of two mills side by side points to a community with diversified agricultural and craft production. The later mill that stood into living memory may have been built on the same footprint or may have incorporated elements of the seventeenth-century structure, though the precise relationship between them is not fully established.