Windmill, Ballymorris, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Kilns

Windmill, Ballymorris, Co. Wexford

Most windmills in Ireland survive as little more than a stump or a scatter of dressed stone, so the tower at Ballymorris in County Wexford is something of an anomaly: a conical windmill tower standing almost complete, rising to around 6.2 metres across three storeys, with an external diameter of 6.6 metres and an internal diameter of 4.8 metres.

What gives it an oddly purposeful quality is the arrangement of opposing doorways, placed on opposite sides of the ground floor, a feature that allowed millers to manage airflow and access regardless of wind direction. One small window survives on the first floor, oriented to the north-east, which is a reminder of how sparingly these working structures were pierced with openings.

The tower sits in a level, low-lying stretch of landscape, the kind of flat, open ground that once made wind power a practical proposition in Wexford. Curiously, it appears on the 1925 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map but not on earlier editions, which raises questions about when it was last in active use and how long it had already been standing idle by the time cartographers thought to record it. Windmills of this conical tower type were built across Ireland from the seventeenth century onwards, gradually falling out of use as steam and water-powered milling became more reliable, and many simply disappeared from the landscape without ever being formally documented.

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