The Granary, Church Street, Cahir, Co. Tipperary

The southern block wears a course of limestone at its eaves, pale and quarried; the northern block, built a generation later, opts instead for a stepped course of red brick. It is a small detail, easy to walk past, but it marks a shift in taste and available materials across roughly thirty years, and it is one of the things that keeps this building legible as two separate acts of construction rather than one.

The southern six-bay block dates to around 1810, three storeys with an attic, its two-bay end walls giving it a compact, boxy footprint typical of mill architecture of the period. The northern block followed around 1840, seven bays wide and built slightly higher, extending the complex without quite matching it. Both are built of random rubble limestone with dressed stone quoins at the corners, and both carry tie bars between the floors, iron rods that run through the building to stop the walls bowing outward under the load of grain or machinery within. The window openings differ block to block too: camber-arched with red brick voussoirs on the south side, red brick block-and-start surrounds on the north, a further sign of the gap in build dates even where the overall massing tries to read as one structure. A former carriage entrance survives in the south gable, segmental-arched and edged in brick, a reminder that this was once a working mill complex with vehicles moving in and out, not simply a warehouse.

Much of what would once have marked it out as industrial building, its original doors and windows, has since been replaced, and the roofs now carry artificial slate rather than whatever covered them originally. Even so, the form of the two blocks remains intact, and the building has found new use as a craft gallery, one of several former mill and warehouse structures around Cahir that have been kept in active use rather than left to decay. Look for the eaves courses first; once you have spotted the limestone-to-brick shift between the two blocks, the building's two-stage history becomes difficult to unsee.