Corn Mill, Maghereen, Co. Cork

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Corn Mill, Maghereen, Co. Cork

Tucked into the roadside at Massytown on the edge of Macroom, this mill on the Sullane River carries a quietly complicated history inside its walls.

What looks from the outside like a single industrial building is in fact several mills folded into one, each layer added or repurposed as circumstances changed, and the whole ensemble still processing oats today.

The older of the two principal structures is a rectangular carding mill, a carding mill being a facility for combing wool fibres before spinning, measuring roughly 19 by 12 metres. Onto its western side, the Walton family, who had connections to a nearby flour mill, added an oat mill in 1832. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six-inch scale in 1842, the complex was recorded as a flour mill, with a mill race running along the northern wall and directly through the carding mill itself. By 1904, the same survey showed the water supply had been substantially rerouted: a new channel drew from the Sullane River about one and a half kilometres to the southwest, filled a mill pond to the north of the building, and fed into a wheel-pit inside the mill. That pit was later fitted, in 1956, with a Craig Francis Turbine brought from Crossmaglen, in County Armagh. A Francis Turbine is a type of water-driven turbine in which water flows inward through fixed guide vanes and spins a runner, extracting energy efficiently from relatively low heads of water. The mill was burnt in the early 1920s, during the period of widespread destruction that accompanied the War of Independence and Civil War, and was subsequently refitted with the machinery still in place. Two pairs of millstones, one for shelling and one for grinding, sit on a low iron table above cogged gearing driven by a belt and pulley system from the turbine, though water shortages mean electricity now does most of the work. A small enclosed flour mill added in the 1930s occupies the northwest corner; it ran only during the Second World War, when supply pressures made local milling worthwhile again. Upper floors hold cleaning machinery, and grain moves between levels by elevator.

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