Old Mill, Ballymoat, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mills
On a stretch of level reclaimed grassland in Ballymoat, County Galway, the ghost of a working mill survives in fragments: a section of millrace, a sluice gate, and a small D-shaped enclosure on the north bank of a stream, its walls built in mortared limestone and measuring roughly nine metres east to west and just under eight metres north to south.
There is no wheel, no millstone, no roof. What remains is the infrastructure of water management rather than milling itself, the channels and controls that once directed the stream's flow with enough force to turn machinery.
The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in Ireland during the 1830s, recorded something considerably more substantial: a roofed, T-shaped building that straddled the stream directly. That unusual configuration, a structure built across rather than beside the water, suggests the mill was designed so that the stream passed beneath or through the building itself, a practical arrangement that kept the working parts sheltered and concentrated the water's energy at the point where it was needed. At some point between that survey and the present, the building was lost entirely, leaving only the earthworks and stonework of its water-control system in the grass.