Cavan Water Mill, formerly Lifeforce Mill, is a 19th-century mill located in Cavan. The current building dates from 1846 and contains a notable MacAdam water turbine. Having been abandoned in the 1960s, it was restored as a museum and visitor attraction in the 1990s.

History of the site

Milling on this site can be traced back to the 14th century, when there was a

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mill in the same location. The current mill was established by the Greene family in 1846. During the 1840s, there were 90 working water mills in County Cavan, but at the time this mill was built it was the only one within a two-mile radius. The building operated as a mill for more than a century until its closure in the 1960s. Following restoration, it operated again for a short while as a working mill for the creation of

wholemeal flour Whole-wheat flour (in the US) or wholemeal flour (in the UK) is a powdery substance, a basic food ingredient, derived by grinding or mashing the whole grain of wheat, also known as the wheatberry. Whole-wheat flour is used in baking of breads ...

for Lifeforce Foods.

Design of the building

The two-storey design has a three-bay extension at split level to the west and a two-storey return to the side. An adjacent mill building to the north was removed from its original site and rebuilt here in 1995 as part of the mill's restoration. As the only surviving example of one of the five mills that stood in Cavan Town, it is listed on the

National Inventory of Architectural Heritage The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH) maintains a central database of the architectural heritage of the Republic of Ireland covering the period since 1700 in complement to the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, which focuses on ar ...

for Ireland.

MacAdam Turbine

Cavan water mill MacAdam water turbine cogs

Cavan Water Mill operates a MacAdam

turbine A turbine ( or ) (from the Greek , ''tyrbē'', or Latin ''turbo'', meaning vortex) is a rotary mechanical device that extracts energy from a fluid flow and converts it into useful work. The work produced by a turbine can be used for generating ...

as opposed to a conventional

water wheel A water wheel is a machine for converting the energy of flowing or falling water into useful forms of power, often in a watermill. A water wheel consists of a wheel (usually constructed from wood or metal), with a number of blades or bucket ...

. The turbine was described as one of the few, if not the only surviving MacAdam turbines in

Ulster Ulster (; ga, Ulaidh or ''Cúige Uladh'' ; sco, label= Ulster Scots, Ulstèr or ''Ulster'') is one of the four traditional Irish provinces. It is made up of nine counties: six of these constitute Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kin ...

in 1983.Anglo Celt, Professor Alan Crocker. Retrieved from http://www.anglocelt.ie/photostore/image-31352 The turbine may be an example of 19th-century industrial espionage, as it is believed to be a patent infringing copy of a design by

Benoît Fourneyron Benoît Fourneyron (31 October 1802 – 31 July 1867) was a French engineer, born in Saint-Étienne, Loire. Fourneyron made significant contributions to the development of water turbines. Benoît Fourneyron was educated at the École Nation ...

. A similar turbine was installed at

Ballincollig Royal Gunpowder Mills The Ballincollig Royal Gunpowder Mills was one of three Royal gunpowder mills that manufactured gunpowder for the British Government. Located in Ballincollig, Cork city, Ireland, largely in what is now the Ballincollig Regional Park, the powde ...

, Cork in 1853.

References

External Links

Cavan Water Mill website
{{Coord, 53.988854, -7.361829, display=title 1846 establishments in Ireland Buildings and structures in County Cavan Grinding mills in the Republic of Ireland