Windmill, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Kilns
Somewhere on the north side of medieval Dublin, a windmill once turned.
That much is certain. Where exactly it stood is another matter entirely, and it is this small gap in the record that gives the site, if it can even be called that, its peculiar character. It appears in the historical literature as a single reference, a structure noted and then effectively lost, leaving no tower, no foundation, no obvious mark on the modern streetscape.
The windmill is recorded by historian Howard Clarke, who places it on Oxmanstown Green in 1330. Oxmantown, as the area was known in the medieval period, took its name from the Ostmen, the Hiberno-Norse settlers who had been pushed across the Liffey following the Anglo-Norman arrival in the late twelfth century. The green itself functioned as a common space on the northern fringe of the medieval city, used for grazing and public gatherings. A windmill positioned there would have served a practical milling function, likely grinding grain, and its placement on open ground would have made sense given the need for exposure to prevailing winds. Windmills of this period were typically post mills, in which the entire wooden body of the structure rotated around a central post to face the wind, though nothing in the surviving record confirms what form this particular example took.
There is, in honest terms, nothing to visit. The green itself no longer exists in any recognisable form, absorbed over centuries into the expanding city north of the river. The area around Smithfield and Church Street covers much of what was once Oxmanstown, though the precise footprint of the green, and with it any hope of pinpointing the mill's location, remains unresolved in the archaeological record. For anyone with an interest in the texture of medieval Dublin, the broader neighbourhood repays a walk, and the question of what once stood where is not an unpleasant one to carry through streets that have changed almost beyond recognition since 1330.