2005:1380 - SILVER SWAN HOTEL, FISH QUAY, SLIGO, Sligo

The site was excavated in advance of redevelopment and identified the stone and red-brick foundations of a flourmill built on the west bank of the Garavogue River by Abraham Martin, an early 19th-century industrialist. The mill was 28m long by 7.8m wide with two ground-floor rooms.
The mill was powered by three undershot waterwheel pits, one external and two internal, housing wheels of c. 3.8m in diameter that were fed by two arched headraces. Two arched tailraces drained between Fish Quay and Martin’s Quay to the north. Of these two tailraces, the internal race had been extended in the later 19th century to reclaim ground and allow the construction of ancillary mill buildings.
Other features found included fragments of curved wooden sluice gates surviving in situ and three axle-bearing blocks with associated pit-wheel pits and a lay shaft pit, all built in stone ashlar. Finds from the backfill of the pit-wheel pits were fragments of a metal axle collar and at least seven millstones.
To the north of the mill building were the near-complete structures of Fish Quay and Martin’s Quay. These stone masonry quays were built in irregular courses of squared roughly faced blocks and survived to a depth of 3.1m. The quays were linked by a triple-arched bridge, built off the bedrock, with two stone ashlar piers and three red and yellow brickwork segmental arches. The bridge appeared to be a later 19th-century rebuild of the original wooden bridge.
The mill was converted into a cold-storage facility in the 1930s and two Liffel turbines were installed at the south-east corner of the mill as a new source of power. The turbines had been removed but remaining were the circular horizontal turbine housings, 1.54m in diameter, bolted into a wooden floor in the submerged turbine room.