It is not somewhere you would expect to find any trace of an industrial milling past. Yet the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in Ireland during the 1830s, marks a windmill somewhere in this area, a quiet sign that the landscape here once looked and functioned quite differently.

The first edition OS six-inch maps, produced by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland from the 1820s onwards, are among the most valuable documents for understanding how Irish towns and townlands appeared before the full transformation of the nineteenth century took hold. Cartographers recorded not just roads and boundaries but working structures, mills among them. Windmills were never as numerous in Ireland as in parts of England or the Netherlands, but they did exist, typically used for grinding grain. By the time later map editions were produced, many had already vanished, either demolished, converted, or simply left to collapse, which makes their appearance on the first edition surveys all the more significant as a record of what once stood.

Because so little documentation survives beyond the map marking itself, pinpointing the exact location within Terenure is not straightforward. The OS six-inch maps can be consulted freely through the OSi historical map viewer online, where the first edition sheets allow you to overlay the old survey against modern satellite imagery. This is probably the most practical way to narrow down where the windmill once stood, by comparing field boundaries, lanes, and other surviving features. On the ground, there may be nothing at all to see, though place names, a slightly raised piece of ground, or an unusually circular boundary in a garden or yard sometimes betray where a mill tower once existed. It is the kind of detail that rewards patient looking rather than any obvious landmark.