History · 1240s to the 1960s
The mills
Seven centuries of water power, from abbey mills to cotton and poplin.
Why the water mattered
The Poddle was bent and diverted above all to turn mill wheels. The monks of St Thomas’s Abbey brought Dodder water into it in the 1240s partly for their mills, and between 1245 and 1324 they redirected its course again to serve them. By 1719 Parliament was complaining that mills along the watercourse were building dams and ponds and starving the city of water.
From source to sea
- Mount Down Mill: local histories use it to mark the end of the Tymon River section, upstream of Kimmage.
- Ravensdale Mills, Kimmage Road Lower: corn and flour, with a pond, sluice and weir, on maps from the 1830s to 1940.
- Farrington’s Mill, Kimmage Cross Roads: flour, with a water turbine until the 1920s.
- Larkfield Mills and a second mill and pond near St Martin’s Drive, with windmills close by.
- Loader’s Park Mills, Kimmage Road Lower: a corn mill, now the Waterwheel apartments.
- Mount Argus: a 19th-century paper mill and a flour mill that became a laundry.
- Harold’s Cross: several watermills, including one in today’s Harold’s Cross Park and a flour mill by Mount Jerome’s gates.
- Greenmount Mills: a corn mill turned cotton mill by 1807, enlarged by the Quaker Pim family for cotton and linen.
- Mill Street and Sweeney’s Lane: a double mill for oil and flour linked to St Thomas’s Abbey.
- Cross Poddle, New Street: a medieval mill beside St Nicholas’ Bridge.
The end of water power
Steam, electricity and competition from British and foreign manufacturers closed the mills one by one in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their ponds were filled in and their races culverted. Greenmount’s mill pond was among the last to go, covered over in the late 1960s. Almost nothing is left to see, but the names survive: Mill Street, the Waterwheel, Larkfield.
