Corn Mill, Rathgoggan Middle, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Mills
There is something quietly melancholy about a building that was recorded in detail only to be demolished shortly afterwards.
The corn mill at Rathgoggan Middle, on the north-eastern edge of Charleville in County Cork, survived long enough to be measured and described, then disappeared. By the time anyone thought to write it up properly, it was already gone.
When inspectors documented it, the mill presented as a roofless, four-storey rectangular structure running approximately twenty metres north to south, its north wall pressed directly against the southern boundary wall of the neighbouring Charleville House. The east elevation carried six bays of small rectangular window openings with wooden lintels, plus two wide ground-floor doorways, one of which had already been blocked up. The west elevation offered a lintelled door and a second, arched one. Three iron tie braces held the whole structure together, the kind of intervention that tends to appear when a building has begun to move and someone decided it was worth saving, at least temporarily. The mill had formerly carried a hipped roof, where the roof slopes down on all four sides rather than ending in a gable, a form that would have given the building a solid, purposeful profile on the north Cork landscape. Beneath the south-east corner, the mill stream that once powered the works continued to flow, though by the time of inspection it had been largely piped underground. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, the building is named Barrack Mill, a detail that hints at a connection to a nearby military or garrison presence, though the name had evidently fallen out of common use by the time the site was absorbed into the Golden Vale industrial complex. The mill's physical remains are now gone entirely, leaving the 1842 map name and a handful of recorded measurements as the main evidence that it ever stood.
