On the eastern bank of the River Loobagh in County Limerick, near the townland of Ballynort, a watermill once stood. Or rather, two watermills stood, close together, their presence now known only because a cartographer thought to record them on a map of Kilmallock town around the year 1600. The site today offers no stone, no millrace, no trace of machinery; just the river and the land, and the knowledge that something purposeful once occupied this stretch of bank.

The map in question is held in Trinity College Dublin as manuscript TCD MS 1209/62, and it shows the two mills positioned on the eastern bank of the Loobagh, just to the west of the Dominican Friary that still partly survives in Kilmallock. A watermill of this period would typically have used a controlled flow of river water to turn a wheel, which in turn drove millstones for grinding grain; in a medieval market town like Kilmallock, such mills were essential infrastructure rather than incidental features. The fact that two appear in such close proximity suggests that milling was a significant local industry at the time, serving a town that was, in the late sixteenth century, one of the more prosperous urban centres in Munster. The record was compiled by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded to the national monuments database in September 2019, drawing attention to a feature that the landscape itself has long since absorbed.

There is no formal access point or marked site to visit. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in the discipline of reading a landscape against a historical document, understanding that absence itself carries information. The River Loobagh can be approached in the vicinity of Kilmallock, and the Dominican Friary, which does retain visible medieval fabric, serves as a useful orienting landmark; the mills, according to the map, lay just to its west. Anyone with an interest in historical cartography or post-medieval archaeology may find the exercise of comparing the c. 1600 map against the present riverbank a rewarding one, even if the ground gives nothing away.