2002:1558 - BIRR: The Old Mill, Newbridge Street, Offaly

Monitoring of groundworks associated with the redevelopment of the Old Mill at Newbridge Street, Birr, was carried out. The building is outside the zone of archaeological potential of Birr but is a protected structure. The Mill complex is on a bend in the north bank of the River Camcor, which is overlooked by Elmgrove Bridge. Newbridge Street gives access to the Mill from the town side of Elmgrove Bridge; the street consists largely of small residential units of early to mid-19th-century date.

The extant buildings on the site are the remains of a distillery established in 1805 (Barnard 1969, 419a), which went out of business in 1889 after a fire. The buildings on this site were part of a larger complex, the remains of which are still visible across the road to the north.

The buildings being redeveloped should be understood in the wider context of the industrial complex as a whole, and studies that are more detailed would place their development in the context of Irish industrial development and the impact of the distillery on 19th-century Birr in terms of employment and social culture. The number of distilleries and their distribution around the county and the country indicate a large and rapidly changing industry responding to legal changes, social changes in drinking, technological changes, competition with distilleries in the north of the country and even the changing fortunes of the British Empire (Byrne 1980; Townsend 1997; Rynne 1999).

The development at Newbridge Street involves the construction of apartments in the skeleton of the main Mill building, the removal of some of the adjacent structures to south, and the creation of a large car-parking facility to the front. Internally, the excavation of fifteen small trenches for post-pad foundations for the new construction was carried out along the inside of the walls of the structure and centrally down the long axis.

Initial engineering cores of the interior indicated the presence of a possible channel running through the building from east to west, on the south side of the interior. The results of the monitoring of the groundworks, as well as the structural indicators from the standing walls, appeared to support this hypothesis. The trenches along the interior of the north wall bottomed onto natural and bedrock within 1.4–1.8m and contained little backfill. The trenches along the south wall tended to be deeper before reaching bedrock at up to 2.5m, with most of the fill being rubble backfill. The interior of the building appeared to have been raised with fill over time, perhaps when the channel for diverting water to the water-wheels was backfilled. No definite evidence of the original ground-floor level was noted. It is probable that there was a wooden floor on the ground floor, spanning the channel and supporting the water-driven wheels. The presence of large relieving arches in the eastern, southern and western walls of the building seems to indicate the former presence of water-driven wooden wheels in these openings. The openings were carefully filled in after the use of hydrodynamic power in the mill ceased.

Water power may have been used to drive a mash tun in the mash house, as was the case in the Millfield distillery in Cork city (Rynne 1999, 66). The mash house contained the mash tun, an apparatus that was used to mix water with malted barley to produce the mash from which the whiskey was eventually distilled. It is possible that the mash house occupied the ground floor of the building.

References
Barnard, A. 1969 The whisky distilleries of the United Kingdom. Devon. [Reprinted from Harper’s Weekly Gazette, 1887.]
Byrne, M. 1980 The distilling industry in Offaly, 1780–1954. In M. Murtagh (ed.), Irish midland studies: essays in honour of N.W. English, 213–28. Athlone.
Rynne, C. 1999 The industrial archaeology of Cork city and its environs. Dublin.
Townsend, P. 1997 The lost distilleries of Ireland. Glasgow.

47 North Main Street, Youghal, Co. Cork