Ormonde Woollen Mills, Canal Walk, Kilkenny, Co. Kilkenny

But the derelict shell on the bank of the River Nore is only one surviving fragment of what was once an extensive industrial complex, and its walls, a mix of random rubble stone with dressed limestone quoins and irregular red brick to the upper floors, hold traces of building work stretching back centuries longer than the roofline suggests. Left to weather since decommissioning, the range has taken on the appealing melancholy of a building quietly returning to the landscape it once dominated.

The site's industrial life is unusually long. Fabric survives here from a corn and tuck mill (a mill used in the finishing of woollen cloth, where fulling beat and thickened the fabric) that predates 1654/5, and the woollen mill built around and over it is recorded from before 1758. Older still are the origins of milling on this stretch of the Nore, said to reach back to the early thirteenth century, giving the complex a claim to being one of the longest continually functioning industrial centres in the Kilkenny area. Its history is bound up with the Ormonde family, whose seat at nearby Kilkenny Castle gave the mills their name and, presumably, their early patronage. Production continued until 1969, by which point the roof had already been replaced, around 1950, with the corrugated asbestos sheeting now visible, and the building fell out of use shortly after.

What remains today is one range among several that made up the wider complex, the others left outside formal documentation because access to them is restricted. Square-headed window and door openings survive, including a loading door on the upper floor of the east-facing side, a small but telling detail of how goods once moved through the building, though the fittings themselves are long gone. The site sits set back from the road, its grounds overgrown, and much of the original grouping of buildings still holds together despite the disrepair, giving a sense of the scale of the complex even in its current state.