H. Bulle.' The brevity of the text is part of its strangeness. It reads like a toast, or a dedication, the kind of thing cut into stone by someone who wanted a name and a year to outlast them, but who left no further explanation for whoever might come looking later.

The stone did not begin its life at the mill. It was salvaged in 1982 from Brinny House, a residence that had stood immediately to the south-east, when that building was demolished. Who Nash was, and what relationship the initials D.H. Bulle had to either Nash or the house, is not recorded. The date, 1776, places the inscription in the late eighteenth century, a period when it was not uncommon for landowners or builders in Ireland to mark improvements or constructions with carved commemorative stones. Whether this stone once formed part of a doorway, a garden wall, or some internal feature of Brinny House itself, the context has been lost along with the building it came from. What remains is the inscription, relocated and re-set, quietly persisting beside a mill that has its own separate history.