Mill, Lisbunny, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Mills
At Lisbunny in County Tipperary, a mill has been gone long enough that no stone of it remains above ground, yet the channel that once fed it survives with a clarity that the building itself no longer has.
The mill race, four metres wide and a metre deep, still runs through the flat river valley between the Ollatrim River and the rising ground to north and south, its course shifting from a winding meander at its upper end to a straighter run as it approaches the tail. It is the infrastructure of industry without the industry itself.
The mill's existence is confirmed by the Down Survey, the remarkable mid-seventeenth-century mapping project ordered by the Cromwellian administration to record land ownership across Ireland prior to redistribution. That survey placed the mill on the southern bank of the mill race, just north of the Ollatrim River, in a location that would have made good use of the modest but reliable topography of the valley. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced in the nineteenth century, record the same channel and preserve enough detail of its shape to allow the winding head and the straightened tail to be traced today. Uncut stone and boulders still protrude along the southern bank of the race, the kind of rough stonework associated with the functional edges of a mill site rather than with any formal construction.


