Water mill, Cross (Coonagh By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Mills
Somewhere along the eastern bank of the Reask River, where the water forms a quiet boundary between the townlands of Cross and Knockballyfookeen in County Limerick, a scatter of rubble stone buildings sits in rough, wet pasture.
The site was once marked on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as 'Cross Tuck Mills', a tuck mill being a type of fulling mill used to clean and thicken woven cloth by pounding it with water-driven hammers. Four rectangular buildings were recorded there. Today, the mill machinery is long gone, a building known locally as 'Chucky's Mill' was demolished at least seventy years ago, and the remaining structures have settled into various states of neglect, one of them almost entirely swallowed by ivy.
The paper trail for this place stretches back further than the Ordnance Survey. The Down Survey map of Coonagh Barony, produced in 1657, depicts a watermill in roughly this location, and there is a possibility the later mill was built on that same site, though no physical evidence has confirmed the connection. More vivid is the entry in the Civil Survey of Limerick, compiled between 1654 and 1656, which records that in 'Both Crosses' there stood 'half a plowland with a Mill in repaire thereunto belonginge, whereof Sr Morish Hurllie of Killduffe is proprietor'. That phrasing, 'in repaire', suggests the mill was functional at the time of surveying, a working part of a mid-seventeenth-century estate. Sir Morish Hurley of Killduff was its recorded owner, and that is about as far as the documentation takes us.
When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 2008, they found a cluster of four buildings still standing, none of them certainly the mill itself. The most recognisable remnant is a small, poorly preserved rubble stone structure with a corrugated lean-to roof, similar in footprint to the northernmost building on the old OS maps. Nearby are two outhouses, a two-storey farmhouse, and the ivy-covered square structure with a door opening to the north-west. The whole area is now heavily screened by trees, which obscured the site even on aerial imagery taken in November 2018. Visitors should expect rough ground, overgrown vegetation, and the kind of sodden pasture that tends to discourage casual exploration; the Reask River, for its part, remains the clearest landmark in an otherwise well-disguised site.