Mill, Formoyle, Co. Clare

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Mill, Formoyle, Co. Clare

One wall of this small mill in the Burren was not built at all; it was simply always there.

The southern side of the structure uses a natural bedrock terrace, rising about 1.2 metres out of the karst limestone, as its base course, with drystone walling added on top. It is a quietly pragmatic detail, and it tells you something about how people built in this landscape, working with the rock rather than against it.

The building sits on a fairly level karst terrace, that characteristic Burren terrain of bare or thinly grassed limestone pavement, at between 500 and 600 feet above sea level, just south of a small stream and overlooking the Caher River valley. It is a rectangular structure, modest in its footprint at roughly 4 metres east to west and 3 metres north to south, put together from undressed, randomly coursed limestone blocks and flags with walls averaging 0.75 metres thick. Despite being unroofed, it survives to its full gable height of 5.5 metres, which is considerable for a building of this type and scale. Access is through a low doorway in the west gable, only a metre high. Inside, a shallow depression running along the inner face of the north wall, paired with an opening at the corner of the east gable and a corresponding opening in the west gable, appears to have carried water through the building, which would have been essential to whatever milling process took place here. Several niches are cut into the interior walls, a possible beam slot survives near the east end of the north wall, and there are traces of corbelling, a technique where stones project progressively inward to support a roof or upper structure, at the corner between the north wall and the east gable. The building appears on the 1915 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map and on Robinson's map of 1977, and is marked and named as an old mill on Geological Survey maps. Nearby, within roughly half a kilometre, lie two enclosures and a house of indeterminate date, suggesting this was once a small but functioning agricultural and domestic cluster in an area that now reads as bare hillside grazing.

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Pete F
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