Westgate Mill, Mill Lane, Drogheda, Co. Louth

Flax, spun and woven into linen, drove a huge share of industry in the northern half of the country, and Drogheda had its own stake in that trade. What survives here is the centrepiece of a much larger complex, a single dominant structure once flanked by stone-built stores that served the working mill, and its scale alone hints at the ambition behind the original enterprise.

The mill dates to around 1820, with a two-storey extension added to the west roughly forty years later as the operation grew. Its pitched slate roof, stone-coped gables and corbelled eaves course with cast-iron guttering are all original details, as are the tooled limestone quoins bracing the rubble stone walls. Square-headed windows carry red brick block-and-start surrounds, a decorative treatment where brick frames the opening in alternating long and short courses, and a number of these still hold their early multiple-pane timber casements on the ground and third floors, even where later pivot windows of around 1920 were fitted elsewhere. The south elevation is given a small flourish in a two-storey round-headed window with a fanlight, brick surround and multiple panes, centred as if to mark the building's principal face toward the river. Doorways on the west elevation, some round-headed, some segmental, have since been blocked, along with several overlights, quiet evidence of a building that kept adapting to new uses long after flax gave way. By the twentieth century it had become a shoe factory, one chapter in a longer working life that has since brought it to its current use as offices and a gymnasium, a rare case of an industrial building carrying its original form and proportion through several changes of trade without losing the outline that made it recognisable in the first place.