Windmills in History

• The Castle or fortified house, its use was obvious, to protect the landowner, his tenants and servants if they were attacked.
• The Church, these people were very religious and their religion was absolutely essential to their lifestyle.
• The Well, a good supply of clean water was a very essential part of the manor, all the better if the well was located within the Castle bawn.
• The Mill, the settlements depended upon grain as their main food during the winter, spring and Early Summer. Grain is designed by Nature to survive fresh throughout the winter so that it could grow again in the spring. As long as you kept the rats away from it and you had saved enough of it you could survive. The problem with grain is that it has to be ground and cooked before humans can use it for food. Grinding grain every few days to support a sizeable number of people took a lot of work and the mill enabled this work to be done easily. This left people free to carry out other essential work. It also gave the lord of the manor a nice source of income.
  If you know that a Castle exists in a place, you know also that a mill must have been built close by. Mills associated with Castles must be very old because the use of small Castles for defence became useless once cannon were in use and this happened over 400 years ago.
  

Lots of Windmills
Two areas of Ireland were particularly noted for their high density of windmills, North County Dublin - Fingal and South County Wexford. In both cases there was from an early date a relatively high population. The topography was flat with a scarcity of good watermill sites and both were fairly windy. These factors made the use of windmills practical and necessary in those areas.
In the case of the baronies of Forth & Bargy in Wexford some 34 watermills and 66 windmills have been documented. Indeed the very last windmill to grind commercially in the Irish Republic is Gerry Mylers mill in Tachumshane, Barony of Forth, County Wexford, which remained working until 1936.

The Windmill's Work
The mills were mostly used to grind corn but some were constructed to do other work. In the early 1800's an attempt was made to start a linen industry in Wexford. A flax windmill was built in the Durra in Wexford by Jacob Poole, a Quaker from Taghmon. He tried to start the industry to give employment as the population was rising at that time. In fact, some of the "marl holes" around South Wexford were used as rotting ponds for flax. The outer part of the flax stalk was allowed to rot in the pond to release the fine linen fibres. The attempt did not succeed.
In Holland the windmills were adapted to many tasks, snuff mills, powder mills, sawmills but the most important being to pump the water from the dykes. The little Dutch boy may have thought he was saving his land by putting his finger into the hole in the dyke but the windmills were pumping the water out for hundreds of years!

Places to Visit
A working example of a horizontal watermill can be seen at the Irish National Heritage Centre near Wexford.
There are many restored and preserved watermills to be seen throughout Ireland.
A working example of an early windmill can be seen at the Yola Farmstead Folkpark near Rosslare.
Two finely restored later style windmills can be seen at Blennerville in Kerry and in Elphin Co. Roscommon.
The Skerries Mills complex in Skerries, Co Dublin contains a restored working example of a 19th Century vertical water wheel. A restored example of a rare 19th Century five-sailed windmill and a restored early windmill complete with oak main shaft and stone bearings. The complex also includes a bakery.
Gerry Meylers windmill in Tacumshane Co. Wexford is the last of them all!
All the above mills are well worth a visit.

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