We snatched an end-of-season holiday last October in Ireland expecting bad weather and wild coastal scenery.  Amazingly the weather was pretty good although as you can see from our photos the rivers were in full spate and the previous week had reportedly been a wipeout.

Travelling between Mayo and Donegal, we were seduced by a label ‘Mills and Falls’ on the map at Collooney in County Sligo.  So we took a diversion and followed the signs to the town – not that easy as 5 miles away down the road was a place confusingly called Coolaney!  No signs to the mills anywhere, so after a few wrong turns we finally made our way through a new housing estate called Mill Falls (bit obvious, that!), and came across the amazing sights that you see in the pictures.

Although they are thought to be corn mills, a comment on the Sligo Hub website suggests that an early map shows that the corn mills were actually on the site of the Mill Falls housing estate, and that the mills you can now see across the river are a carbide mill and a fabric mill. Wikipedia says that Charles O’Hara built a bleach mill there, which was also used at times for producing carbide.