The corn mill at Carrigtishane, overlooking a tidal inlet of the Castlehaven estuary in west Cork, is something else: a five-storey working structure that has accumulated its technologies rather than discarding them, each generation of power source layered on top of the last.

The building itself is rectangular, constructed into the natural slope of the land in the manner typical of mills that needed gravity to assist the movement of grain through the process. At some point the original water wheel was superseded by a turbine, a more efficient way of extracting power from flowing water, though that turbine is now inaccessible within the structure. The turbine in turn gave way to a pair of early Crossley Bros. diesel engines, the kind of heavy, low-speed internal combustion machinery that began replacing water power on working farms and mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unusually, those engines remain operable. The mill now produces cattle feed, and numerous pieces of original mill furniture, the internal fittings and mechanisms used to move, clean, and grind grain, survive within the building. The miller's house stands to the east, completing what amounts to a remarkably intact industrial complex for rural Cork.