The waterwheel is twenty-five feet across, manufactured at Stevenson's Strabane Foundry in 1867, and it still turns. Three revolutions a minute. Eight horsepower. Enough to drive a millstone, a shelling stone, a kiln, a system of bucket elevators, fans, sieves, and a sack hoist - the entire mechanical innards of a three-storey mill - while a single miller did the bagging. Five kilometres west of Letterkenny, on the south bank of the River Swilly where the R250 crosses at Newmills Bridge, the corn and flax mills of Donegal's most complete surviving milling complex are still in working order, restored and preserved by the Office of Public Works. The millrace runs a kilometre upstream. The kiln still works. The grinding stones still grind, when the volunteers feed them oats.
The combination of a corn mill and a flax mill on the same site, sharing the same water power, is mostly an Ulster pattern. The two crops fitted the same farming cycle: oats and barley for human and animal food, flax for the linen industry that defined the north of Ireland's economy for two centuries. A single millpond and a single millrace could power both, with two separate water wheels for the two operations. Mills like this once dotted Donegal and Tyrone and Antrim. Newmills survived because the Gallagher family bought it in 1892 and kept it running, with significant improvements, for nearly ninety years - and because in 1986 the Irish state recognised what it was looking at and bought the complex for preservation.
When Patrick Gallagher bought the mill complex from William Devine in 1892, he was buying more than mills. The deal included the public house and grocery store attached, a residence, a scutcher's cottage by the millpond, a forge across the road, and a sizeable farm. Gallagher made the buildings into a small commercial empire. In the early years of the twentieth century, an export trade in Donegal farm produce grew up around the Newmills grocery. When Sir Thomas Lipton - the Glasgow grocer who would later build a tea empire that bears his name - opened his first shop in Glasgow, his initial consignments of butter, bacon, and eggs came from Newmills. The Gallagher pub and shop ran alongside the mills through the twentieth century. P.F. Gallagher, Patrick's son, continued the business until his death in 1980. The original family home, shop, and pub still sit on the grounds and are being restored by the National Monuments Section.
Grain arrived from local farmers, sometimes carted in from twenty miles away, and the first job was to dry it. The kiln in the mill's basement burned mulled coal, a smokeless fuel like anthracite. Turf was avoided because it gave the oats an off flavour. The dried grain - about 15 centimetres deep on perforated metal floor plates - was then moved to shelling stones on the ground floor, which broke the hull from the kernel. The kernels went onto the grinding stones - usually French burr, a particular type of quartz stone that had to be "dressed" or chiselled regularly to keep its cutting grooves sharp. The miller could raise or lower the upper stone to produce fine, pinhead, or coarse oatmeal. Then the meal travelled by belted bucket elevators to the upper floor for cleaning and winnowing, back down for bagging, and up to storage. One man could run the whole operation. It took 75 kilos of oats to make 50 kilos of meal.
The Donegal miller did not work for cash. Like millers throughout the British Isles for centuries before him, Harry Pinkerton of Raphoe and the Gallaghers before him took payment in meal. Every 50-kilo bag of meal produced from a farmer's grain yielded the miller a fixed share - about 4.5 kilos, ten pounds. The system was ancient. It ran by trust. The miller weighed the meal honestly. The farmer accepted the cut without quarrel. Across late summer through to May the following year - some eight or nine months - the mill ground steadily, with summer months given over to mixing animal feed from imported maize and local oats. The Newmills miller was the centre of a small economic world: every farmer in the Swilly valley brought his harvest here, every farmer left with meal, and the miller's tenth of a bag was the cost of turning grain into food.
In 1978 An Foras Forbatha - the precursor to Ireland's modern heritage bodies - completed an inventory of industrial archaeological monuments and singled out Newmills as by far the best example of a working mill complex in County Donegal. In 1986 the Irish state bought the mills for preservation. In 1989, under the direction of the Office of Public Works, a team of Irish and international volunteers restored the millrace, the wheels, and the machinery to working condition. The site reopened as a national monument and a working museum. Today visitors can watch the 25-foot wheel turn under the weight of Swilly water, hear the gearing creak into motion, and see the grinding stones - dressed and picked, French burr from quarries far away - reduce a hopper of oats to oatmeal at three revolutions a minute, exactly as they did in 1907.
The mill sits at 54.93°N, 7.81°W on the south bank of the River Swilly, 5 km west of Letterkenny on the R250 road to Churchill. City of Derry Airport (EGAE) is 16 nm north-northeast; Donegal Airport (EIDL) is 24 nm west. The mill complex is a cluster of stone buildings beside the river crossing at Newmills Bridge, with the long arc of the millrace visible upstream. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft AGL on clear days; the Swilly valley running northeast toward Letterkenny is the dominant geographic feature.