Flour Mills, Parksgrove, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Mills
At the western end of Ballyragget Bridge, where the River Nore runs through County Kilkenny, the maps remember a building that no longer exists.
A flour mill once stood here, fed by a mill race, the artificial channel cut to divert river water and drive a wheel, that stretched for roughly 240 metres to the north. By the mid-twentieth century the structure had vanished entirely, and the 1947 revision of the Ordnance Survey shows nothing at all on the site. What had been a working industrial landmark was quietly erased from the landscape, leaving only cartographic traces behind.
The paper trail reaches back surprisingly far. The Down Survey, the ambitious mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned under the Cromwellian administration to record Irish land ownership in the 1650s, includes a parish map of Donoghmore that marks a watermill on the western bank of the Nore at this precise location. Whether the flour mill that appears on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1839, at the southern end of that same mill race, was a direct continuation of that earlier structure or a later rebuild on the same favourable ground is not certain. The site may have supported milling activity from the seventeenth century onward, or the mill shown in 1839 may have been an eighteenth or nineteenth-century construction that simply occupied a spot where a predecessor had once stood. The 25-inch Ordnance Survey map also records a flour mill here, making the eventual disappearance of the building all the more complete by contrast.