A gig mill at a place called Furnace, in County Mayo, points to a particular kind of industrial past that sits uneasily with the county's usual associations of subsistence farming and Atlantic coastline. A gig mill was a textile finishing machine, used to raise the nap on woven cloth by drawing it across rollers set with the dried heads of teasel plants. The fact that one was apparently recorded here suggests a small-scale industrial operation of some kind, the sort of enterprise that flickered briefly into existence across rural Ireland during the eighteenth or nineteenth century, often under the encouragement of improving landlords or linen-board schemes, before quietly disappearing again.

The townland name Furnace adds another layer of intrigue. Furnace townlands in Ireland frequently mark the sites of early iron-working, where small blast furnaces once smelted local ore using charcoal from the surrounding woodlands. Whether the industrial activity at this particular site was connected to iron-working, textile production, or some combination of the two is not entirely clear from what survives, but the pairing of these two names, gig mill and furnace, in the same small locality in Mayo gestures towards a moment when this corner of Connacht was doing something more mechanically complex than its landscape now suggests.