Mill, Killeenadeema, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mills
A place can survive in name long after every physical trace of it has vanished, and the area around Killeenadeema in County Galway offers a quiet example of this.
A small cluster of houses marked as 'Millmount' on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps takes its name from a mill that once stood roughly 140 metres to the south-west. Nothing of the structure remains above ground today, and local knowledge has not preserved any record of what kind of mill it was, whether it was powered by water or wind, or what it processed.
The six-inch OS maps, surveyed in Ireland primarily during the 1830s, captured a landscape that was already changing rapidly, and placenames attached to working buildings often outlasted the buildings themselves by generations. A millmount, in general usage, could refer to the raised ground on which a mill was built, or simply to the immediate area associated with one, and the name here suggests the feature was significant enough in the local landscape to anchor the identity of the surrounding settlement. Beyond that, the record falls silent.