Mill - fulling, Ballymee, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Mills
Along the south-east bank of the Awbeg River in north Cork, two ruined tuck mills sit roughly forty metres apart, their limestone walls slowly returning to the ground.
A tuck mill, also called a fulling mill, was used to clean and thicken freshly woven woollen cloth by pounding it repeatedly in water, a process that tightened the fibres and made the fabric more durable. What makes this site quietly puzzling is the presence of a runner millstone lying abandoned in the dry millrace of the larger structure, suggesting that at some point the building's function shifted, or was supplemented, by corn grinding. A mill built for cloth finishing does not ordinarily carry a millstone, and the object raises questions that the surviving fabric cannot fully answer.
Both structures appear on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as two rectangular buildings aligned on a north-west to south-east axis, and the physical remains largely bear that out. The more substantial of the two is a two-storey building of random-rubble limestone, measuring just over ten and a half metres along its long axis and roughly five and a half metres wide internally. Its dry millrace channel runs through the centre of the building, passing beneath arched openings in two of its walls, and the north-west elevation retains two first-floor windows and a chimney above the gable, details that hint at a working environment rather than a purely industrial shell. The second mill, about forty metres to the south, is considerably more fragmentary; its south-east gable is partly formed by a natural rock face, and only the outline of two walls survives above ground. A pond immediately to its south-west is likely the former mill pond. The 1842 map shows the millrace drawing from the Awbeg about four hundred metres to the west, where it divided to supply both mills, a single watercourse engineered to serve two separate operations along the same bank.