Windmill, Feltrim, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Kilns
On the summit of Feltrim Hill in north County Dublin, a low ring of masonry sits at the edge of a quarry drop, largely swallowed by vegetation.
It is all that survives of a three-storey cylindrical windmill, demolished on 23rd October 1973, and most visitors to the area would have no reason to suspect it was ever there at all.
The structure's origins are traced by the historian Flanagan to the period after 1667, when it was erected as a woollen mill, built using Dutch bricks, a detail that points to the trading and craft connections of later seventeenth-century Ireland, when Dutch influence on Irish commercial and architectural life was not uncommon. The mill tapered as it rose, a characteristic form designed to make the most of wind at height, and it stood three storeys tall before its conversion to a corn mill sometime in the nineteenth century, reflecting the broader agricultural shifts of that era. What remains today is the base, described as substantial, positioned on a precipice above the quarry face.
Reaching the site requires crossing ground that is, by all accounts, heavily overgrown, so appropriate footwear and some patience with vegetation are advisable. The base sits on the hill's summit, which means the quarry edge is close by, and a degree of care is warranted on the approach. There is no formal access or signage to speak of, and the remains are easy to overlook beneath the encroaching growth. What survives is not a ruin in any dramatic sense, more a low remnant that rewards those who know what they are looking at, the footprint of an almost entirely vanished piece of post-medieval industrial history on the Dublin fringe.