Tuck Mill, Sledagh, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Mills
A tuck mill, for those unfamiliar with the term, was used in the finishing of woollen cloth, beating and thickening the fabric with heavy hammers driven by water power.
That this particular type of mill once operated at Sledagh, in the Bargy barony of County Wexford, is recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1839, which places it roughly sixty metres east of a small north-south stream. What makes the site quietly curious is not just the survival of its physical remains, but the layering of histories that may or may not connect to one another across several centuries.
The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed Cromwellian land assessment, noted a ruined mill at Sledagh even at that relatively early date. The landowner at the time was most likely John Devereux, who held around 240 acres in the area in 1640. By the mid-seventeenth century, then, a mill had already fallen into disuse, its origins presumably reaching back further still. The ruins visible today, however, tell a different story: a two-storey mill-house retaining the frame of an overshot wheel, which was a type of water wheel fed from above by a mill-race, together with two millstones and an associated mill pond. These remains appear to date from the eighteenth or nineteenth century rather than from any earlier period, and there is no firm evidence that this later structure occupies the same ground as the mill recorded in 1654.