Mill, Kilmorgan, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Mills
In the overgrowth of Kilmorgan townland in County Sligo, a mill has been quietly vanishing for centuries.
No standing structure remains above ground today, the site having been swallowed by dense vegetation, yet two separate historical documents, separated by nearly two hundred years, independently record its existence. That degree of cartographic persistence for something so thoroughly erased is quietly remarkable.
The earliest reference appears on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, the ambitious mid-seventeenth-century project that mapped landholdings across Ireland following the Cromwellian conquest. The mill is marked there adjacent to the eastern townland and barony boundary, in the general vicinity of Kilmorgan church. By 1838, when the Ordnance Survey produced its first detailed six-inch maps of Ireland, a T-shaped mill was recorded immediately south of the road running west from Cams Bridge, and it is possible, though not certain, that this later structure occupied the same ground as the earlier one. What survives now is not the mill itself but the faint outline of what was probably an associated building, a rectangular structure roughly six metres by three and a half, defined more by absences than by fabric: a hollow in the ground, a scarp on two sides, a short section of wall two metres high built against a rock face, and a lintelled doorway less than a metre wide. A millrace, the channel that would have directed water to power the millwheel, can still be traced as an embanked curve running around the structure to the south and east. Kilmorgan church stands roughly fifty metres to the south, old enough to have been a near neighbour to the mill across several generations of use.