Shrule Mills, Garrynagh, Co. Longford

Most milling complexes in County Longford were built modestly, to grind corn and oats for the immediate district, but this one was built for the merchant flour trade, and flour milling demanded far more: vast storage for meal and grain, taller ranges, deeper cellars. It is thought to be the only purpose-built merchant flour mill the county produced, which makes its present state, roofless, floorless, its window frames stripped out, all the more striking against what it once represented.

The core of the complex probably dates to the late eighteenth or very early nineteenth century, a period when Irish corn and oat milling was expanding rapidly. Around 1850 it was extended, most notably by the addition of the five-storey block at the south end, absent from the Ordnance Survey map of 1838 and, according to local tradition, once marked with a date stone reading 1847, though it has not been located. A round-headed opening at the gable apex of this block may once have held a bell. The same building phase likely added the four-storey grain drying kiln to the north, with its brick vaulted ceiling and surviving ovens, and a small office building to the southeast. By the 1830s the mill was recorded as the property of Councillor Henderson, and Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, noted flour mills near the bridge of Shrule producing some 4,000 barrels annually. By the mid-1850s it was leased to Michael Murtagh, and Griffith's Valuation describes the property as a house, offices, flour mill and kiln, rated at £80. Ownership passed later to Matthew Fegan, recorded in the 1880s and 1890s, before the mill closed in the early twentieth century. Across the river stood a separate three-storey corn mill, owned around 1855 by Philip McGlynn and powered by two eleven-foot wheels turning two sets of millstones, an arrangement that shows just how much water power the Inny could yield at this stretch of its course. The five-storey block also has a literary and political footnote: the poet and Fenian John Keegan Casey, known by the pen name Leo, worked here as a clerk during the 1860s before his involvement in the rising of 1867.

What survives today is largely structural bones: hipped and pitched slate roofing reduced to fragments, cut stone eaves courses, brick voussoirs around door and window openings, and cast-iron wall ties still gripping the rubble stone. The most evocative single feature is the remains of the former breast-shot millwheel at the west end of the northern block, sixteen feet in diameter, its cast-iron axle and rings still fitted with timber spokes and the remnants of the floats that once caught the water. The arched openings that once fed the head and tail races survive at the south gable and along the north elevation, quiet evidence of the engineering that once drove five storeys of grinding and storage on this bend of the Inny, southwest of Ballymahon.