Water mill, Archerstown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Mills

Water mill, Archerstown, Co. Tipperary

On the eastern bank of the Poulaneigh River, in low-lying, marshy ground in County Tipperary, there is almost nothing left to see.

A mound of dumped rubble, a softening of the terrain, and the lingering channel of a millrace are about all that remains of a flour mill that once stood at Archerstown. The building itself was levelled around 1981, the rubble apparently pushed into place to create a platform for something new that, so far as the evidence suggests, was never built.

The site has a longer history than its current state implies. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land inquisition carried out under Cromwellian administration, records "a Mill in repaire" at Archerstown, suggesting that by the mid-seventeenth century the mill was already an established feature of the townland. By 1843, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, it was specifically recorded as a flour mill, processing grain in the way that such water-powered mills had done across rural Ireland for centuries. A millrace, the artificial channel cut to direct river water onto the mill wheel, still runs through the site, and it may well be the same one that served the mill mentioned in the seventeenth-century survey. The continuity between those two records, separated by nearly two hundred years, points to a modest but persistent piece of working infrastructure, ordinary in its time and now almost entirely erased.

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Pete F
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