Newmills Corn and Flax Mills

Take a short trip five kilometres out of Letterkenny on the Churchill road for a first-hand look at the technology that powered the Industrial Revolution. The oldest surviving building at Newmills is 400 years old and there have been mills here since the early nineteenth century. In Victorian times a flax mill lay at the core of the complex, scutching the fibre that supplied the linen industry, the backbone of Ulster's economy, while a corn mill ground barley, oats and imported maize. Newmills grew to include a public house, a scutcher's cottage and a forge, and by the early 1900s the first supplies of butter, bacon and eggs for Sir Thomas Lipton's Glasgow grocery empire came from here. The mills worked until 1982. The waterwheel that drove the corn mill, 25 feet across and installed in 1907, is one of the largest working waterwheels in the country and still turns. Entry is free, with a film on linen and free guided tours from mid May to early October.