Ireland has so many famous places to visit, names that are embedded in songs, in legends, in images, that it’s almost a surprise to find one local enough that even its name doesn’t sound familiar.
That’s what happened to us, though: We were on the way for a short visit to see an exhibit at a Dublin museum, we had a spare day, and were looking for something low-key and different to fill it. From somewhere, my wife came upon Skerries and its mills, and we decided to go.
Skerries’ windmills go back 500 years, it’s a small town perched on the ocean’s edge, it’s easy to reach by regional rail from Dublin, and it has a small history site around the mills. Easy choice!
The two windmills, at the corners of a large field, and the watermill are located near a group of stone buildings that housed a bakery from about 1840 to 1986. The mills ground grain both for the bakery and for nearby customers, including producing various grades of grain for feed.
The bakery wasn’t exactly a relic when its career ended in a fire, but it wasn’t late 20th century, either, and its equipment and processes, with some addition and renovation, have become a museum that brings the old processes alive for new eyes.
As well, there are displays of other equipment of its era, and a small exhibit about Skerries’ role in the Irish independence campaigns and Civil War.
Our guide, whose family worked around the bakery for many years, showed us through the tools and processes of the bakery, how ingredients were mixed and the dough shaped.
The bakery at Skerries also supplied wholesale bread to numbers of stores around the area, which explains why they needed such a large oven—notice how large the interior is. Called a Scotch oven because that’s where it was made, it could hold 32 dozen 2-pound loaves at a time. The smaller oven, used for specialty and sweet loaves, could hold 15 dozen.
The business of grinding grain into flour of various kinds was the next part of our tour. Originally, the windmills powered the process, but by the 19th-century, it had become the work of a waterwheel, installed in a mill race next to the buildings. Even later, the job was turned over to modern engines.
But until the advent of modern steel milling machines, the most expensive and important part of grain milling was the grindstone itself, with its intricate pattern of grooves and ridges, which need to be perfectly made. Otherwise, the flour will be inconsistent in fineness, or so fine as to be a fire hazard if the wheel sparks. The medieval illustration reminds that the man who made the stone was among the best-paid and most-skilled artisans of the age.
The milling process is also a bit like a game of Chutes and Ladders, with the wheel fed by gravity from bins above, and sacks of grain, and later flour, hoisted to storage spaces above. At Skerries, the ladders, wheel housings and chutes are beautiful wooden structures.
Some of the beams used in the mills and barns come from a schooner that was wrecked off the Skerries coast.
Outside the stone buildings, across from the water wheel, there’s a threshing barn, where a power-driven machine separated grain, mostly wheat, from the chaff, the remaining part of the stalks.
Before the 19th-century, threshing was mostly done by numbers of workers beating the stalks with tools; the invention of the threshing machine around 1800 needed much less labor, and produced far fewer jobs.
Before mechanical power became widely available, some machinery was powered by horses or mules tethered to wheels like this one.
The old windmills themselves stand a bit away from the buildings. Although flour has been milled at Skerries since the 12th-century, the first windmill was built in the 1500s, probably on the site of the 17th-century ‘small mill’ that stands today.
The Great Five Sail Mill, as they like to call it, actually started life as a four-sail mill in the 1790s; after an 1838 fire it was rebuilt with five sails. The red wheel is at the end of a long external arm that’s used to turn the upper part of the mill to face the wind.
And, from the gift shop, a gentle laugh.
