Watch: Take at dander around the Newmills Corn and Flax Mills just outside Letterkenny, Co Donegal

During their time up on Inishowen they nipped down to Letterkenny and visited the Newmills Corn and Flax Mills on the Churchill Road. It was quite a nostalgic trip for Darryl as this is the sort of mills that his family ran and owned at Draperstown just across the border from Donegal.

The oldest surviving building at Newmills is 400 years old and there have been mills at Newmills since the early nineteenth century. In Victorian times a flax mill lay at the core of the complex, providing crucial supplies to the linen industry, the backbone of Ulster’s economy at the time. A corn mill ground barley, oats and imported maize.

Newmills steadily expanded to include a public house, a scutcher’s cottage and a forge. By the early 1900s Newmills was also exporting food – the earliest supplies of butter, bacon and eggs for Sir Thomas Lipton’s nascent grocery empire in Glasgow came from there.

The waterwheel that drove the corn mill can still be seen in action. It is one of the largest working waterwheels in the country.

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