Drumlonagher Mill, Ballybofey Road, Donegal, Co. Donegal

This is industrial architecture on an almost defiant scale, four bays wide and rising well above anything a small local farm mill would have needed. The building has lost its roof and its floors, and red brick blocking now fills some of the openings on the south elevation, but the walls themselves, built with flush dressed quoins at the corners, have held their shape with a stubbornness that says something about how they were originally put together.

The mill dates from around 1855, built to process corn and flour at a time when water power still made economic sense across rural Ireland, before steam engines and later fossil-fuelled turbines drew business away from riverside sites like this one during the second half of the nineteenth century. Griffith's Valuation, the mid-nineteenth-century property survey used to calculate local rates, records the holding around 1860 as the property of the Earl of Arran, with a man named Anthony McLogue running it as miller or manager. At seventeen acres and a rateable value of £64, this was a substantial concern, a merchant mill trading well beyond its immediate townland rather than a small vernacular operation serving a few neighbouring farms. The Drummeeny River, a tributary of the Eske, supplied the power: water was drawn off upstream to fill a mill pond to the south, now built over and gone, and carried to the mill along a headrace that has since silted up entirely. The tailrace to the north-west has fared better, its course still traceable, with a single-arched stone bridge crossing it near the south end.

Little of the machinery survives, but a sandstone millwheel remains to the west of the building, and together with the stone bridge over the tailrace it still frames something of how the whole complex once worked, water drawn from the river, channelled past the wheel, and returned downstream once its energy was spent. The site sits back from the main Donegal to Ballybofey road, a short distance past Donegal Community Hospital, in its own grounds. A single-storey outbuilding with a corrugated metal roof stands to the south, a plainer working companion to the mill's more imposing bulk.