Windmill, Fence, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Kilns

Windmill, Fence, Co. Wexford

The date 1846 is cut into the stone lintel above the eastern doorway of this three-storey tower near Fence in County Wexford, a small but precise detail that anchors the building firmly in time.

What makes it more remarkable is that this is, or was, the last intact windmill in Ireland, a distinction that earned it protected status as a National Monument in the 1950s. The tower tapers as it rises, with walls roughly 85 centimetres thick at the base narrowing to about 40 centimetres at the top, and its external diameter runs to around six metres. The cap, which would have been rotated to face the sails into the wind, was turned by hand rather than by any mechanical tail-gear.

The mill was built by James Moran, a millwright who had trained in Holland, and he made and fitted all of the wooden working parts himself. By 1911 it was one of only about five mills still operating in County Wexford, but by the 1930s it had lost its roof and fallen into disrepair. It was at this point that Gerald Murphy acquired the building and undertook a careful rescue, sourcing iron replacement parts from another Wexford windmill at Ballyfane and having the structure re-thatched. That intervention kept the mill grinding until 1936 and preserved it structurally into the 1950s, when ownership passed to Murphy's nephew, Michael Myler. Inside, the two pairs of millstones on the first floor were under-driven, meaning the power came up through the floor from below rather than down from above, and the joists of each floor are set into the walls in slightly different ways as the tower narrows. The remains of a corn-drying kiln, used to dry grain before milling, survive nearby.

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