The Old Mill, Main Street, Ballindrimley Road, Castlerea, Co. Roscommon

What catches the eye first is the sheer accumulation of the site: not one building but four, abutted together in a single east-west running range, each raised or altered at a different point so that the roofline shifts from seven bays of two and three storeys down to a single-bay block with a bare concrete upper storey. Random coursed stone walls, yellow brick dressings on the central section, a scatter of square-headed and segmental-headed windows and the odd surviving timber battened door all speak to a working building added to and patched rather than one built to a single plan.

The mill was built around 1725 by the Sandford family of Castlereagh House, and it processed corn using power drawn from the Suck by a mill race that still survives, along with derelict outbuildings, at the rear of the site. The central of the four buildings retains a blocked arch on its western side and, on the eastern side, an intact arch housing the iron wheel itself, a detail that makes this one of the more complete surviving examples of its kind in the area rather than a shell with the machinery long stripped out. Workers' accommodation once stood to the east, and together with the mill race and wheel it forms a coherent industrial group, one that marks the western approach to the town as a place shaped by water power long before it was shaped by road traffic. That later road traffic has left its own mark: when the adjoining bridge and road were widened, most of the original entrance was lost, and only one dressed limestone gate pier survives to hint at how the site was once approached. A concrete wall now bounds the complex, and to the south of the bridge stands a former hydro-electric station, a reminder that the Suck's power was harnessed here more than once, first for grinding corn and later for generating electricity.

There is little formal access to speak of, and the buildings are derelict, so any visit is really a matter of viewing the group from the roadside and the bridge rather than entering the site itself. The most rewarding vantage is where the road crosses the river, close to the one surviving gate pier, from where the full run of the four-part range and the arch housing the mill wheel can be picked out against the water. The former hydro-electric station just south of the bridge is worth pausing at too, since it extends the story of this stretch of the Suck as a working river beyond the age of milling.