Flour mill, Ballincar, Co. Sligo

By 1994, when the site was examined, the mill building itself had entirely disappeared. What survived was the mill-race, the channel cut to direct water onto the wheel, a modest but telling trace of a working past that stretches back well before the sixteenth century.

The historical record points to a mill at Ballincar predating the accession of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558, making it a medieval or early Tudor operation at the very least. By 1633 to 1636 it was described as an Irish mill, a term that almost certainly refers to a horizontal mill. Unlike the vertical waterwheel familiar from later centuries, a horizontal mill placed a flat wheel directly in the stream below the millstone, with water directed at it from a narrow chute. The design was simple, required no gearing, and was widespread in early Ireland. Whether the mill documented in the 1630s was a direct continuation of the pre-Elizabethan one, or a successor on the same site, the sources do not make clear.