Corn Mill, Kilnap, Co. Cork

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Mills

Corn Mill, Kilnap, Co. Cork

On the southern slope of Kilnap Glen, a roofless red sandstone shell carries a date stone reading 1871 on its east wall, and the Ordnance Survey map of 1902 already noted it as disused.

By then, Shaw's flour mills had passed through two distinct phases of industrial life and were on the cusp of a third, having been taken over as a sculpture works shortly after the turn of the century. The building that stands today is a two-storey structure with rusticated limestone quoins, six bays along its north elevation, and camber-headed brick arches over the window openings. The west wall is gone entirely, removed when a later addition was built against it.

Shaw's mills were established here in the 1830s, making use of the glen's water supply. By the 1860s, two water wheels were in operation, though no trace of their pits survives. The present structure dates from 1871, and the machinery that once filled it reflects a late Victorian industrial confidence in combining power sources. A narrow yard on the east face contains an earth-filled pit that most likely housed a Pelton wheel turbine, a type of impulse turbine driven by a high-pressure jet of water, fed via a cylindrical vertical duct and an iron water tank supplied through a brick-lined headrace. Alongside this water-driven system, a cross-compound steam engine once operated to the south, its flywheel driving an eccentric rod that powered a stone saw; a second steam engine and saw occupy a one-storey gabled structure to the east. The flue from the boiler appears to have run underground at an angle to an octagonal brick chimney, about ten metres tall, that stood on the hilltop roughly fifty metres to the south. The mill pond to the east was substantially enlarged during the same late nineteenth-century rebuilding. Presiding over the eastern edge of the site is a massive rusticated stone railway viaduct, constructed around 1849, which predates the rebuilt mill and gives the whole complex an unexpectedly monumental backdrop.

The interior is now filled with rubble, and the wall of an earlier structure, oriented east to west, still revets the hillside to the south. The site layers three or four generations of industrial thinking into a compact space, from water wheels to turbines to steam, with the ghost of a hilltop chimney somewhere above.

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