2012:028 - CLOUGHMILLS BIODIVERSITY PARK, Antrim

This development was for a biodiversity riverside park and children’s play area. The site lies on the right hand bank of the Cloghmills water with the main focus of the proposal being immediately west of a series of historically significant Industrial buildings (NIEA - IHR: 0657800000), including a mill race. As the mill race was to be backfilled, NIEA requested that it be surveyed. Once the overlying scrub had been removed the line of the mill race was surveyed. It was found to principally correspond to the latest OSNI data with the only change being a slight softening of the angular curve in the west of the mill race and the west end extending slightly further than previously recorded. Two test trenches were excavated through the mill race, the most easterly was at the junction of the mill race and the upstanding building (a boiler room as identified by F. Hammond in the 2009 Industrial Heritage Survey of the site) under which it exited the mill complex; the 2nd was 30m west of this.
Test trench 1 was undertaken through the easternmost point of the mill race. It revealed the archway from which the water had exited the mill complex. The arch was 1.63m wide and 1.2m high (internally) and was made from roughly hewn stone, held together by a yellow tinged lime mortar. The arch formed the end of a tunnel which led eastwards underneath the neighbouring building and on into the mill complex. Though the end of this tunnel was mostly in-filled it was possible to see that a great deal of the interior remained open. The base of this tunnel was lined with thick lime mortar and stones. The mill race exposed to the west of the archway showed no evidence for any form of walling and appeared to have been hewn directly out of the relatively soft basaltic and marl bedrock. The base of the race was at a depth of c. 2m below the current ground surface and was 2.5m wide.
Trench 2 was undertaken some 30m west of the first test trench. In this section the mill race had the remains of dry stone walling along both sides, the walling was to a depth of 0.6m to the south and 0.45m to the north. The walls were only a single stone wide and were simply packed in with subsoil rather than mortar. The absence of walling noted in the previous trench may have been due to the stones being washed away by the additional force that the water would have had when exiting the tunnel. The base of the race was at a depth of c. 2m below the current ground surface and had an internal width of 1.65m.

Northern Archaeological Consultancy Ltd, Farset Enterprise Park, 638 Springfield Road, Belfast, BT12 7DY