Old Mill, Ardagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mills
In the woods near Ardagh in County Galway, a small stream once turned a mill wheel.
Today there is no trace of the building above ground, yet it was substantial enough in 1838 to be recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, depicted as a structure aligned roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, bridging a westerly-flowing stream that drains into the nearby Salt Lake. The mill vanished so completely that fieldwork found nothing on the surface, leaving only the map name, Old Mill, as a kind of ghost label over an empty patch of woodland.
What survives, faintly, is the millrace. A millrace is a channel cut to carry diverted water from a stream to the mill wheel and back again, and on the northern bank of the stream a dried-up depression roughly fifteen metres long may represent that original course, running parallel to the water. Fragments of drystone walling are visible along it, modest remnants that might otherwise be dismissed as field clearance or a collapsed boundary. Together, the channel and the walling are the only physical evidence that anything industrial ever operated here, channelling water from this small Galway stream toward machinery that ground grain or processed some other material entirely.
