The cylindrical stone mill at Ballyharty in County Wexford fits that description well enough from a distance. Set on a slight rise in an otherwise low-lying stretch of countryside, it once would have caught whatever wind came in off the surrounding flatlands, the elevation modest but enough to matter when you are trying to turn a millstone.

The tower survives to a height of just over five metres, which is remarkably complete for a structure of its kind. Its external diameter runs to nearly five metres, with an internal diameter of three metres, giving walls of considerable thickness. Two doorways were set into opposing faces, east and west, though the western one is now blocked. Projecting steps on the inner face of the southern wall once connected the western entrance to the upper floor, an arrangement that kept the working levels of the mill accessible without cluttering the ground floor. That ground floor holds one of the more telling details of the building: a tall bottle-shaped recess cut into the northern wall, rising from the ground to the first floor. At roughly 1.36 metres wide and nearly three metres high, it was designed specifically to give flour sacks room to bulge outward as they filled, a practical solution to the pressures of milling grain in a confined cylindrical space. The first floor was lit by narrow windows at the north-west and south, its joists set directly into the masonry at east and west. The floor above that rested on a rebate, a ledge cut into the inner face of the wall to carry the floorboards, with further windows at north-east and south-west. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area at six-inch scale in 1839, the mill was recorded as being in active use, which suggests it was a working part of the local agricultural economy well into the nineteenth century.