Mills on the Glashaboy, 1700s onward
The Belfast of the South
The Glashaboy River drops fast enough between Bottle Hill and the tidal Lee at Dunkettle to turn a mill wheel, and from the 1700s the Glanmire valley filled with them. Linen, wool, paper and dyeing works lined the banks - so much manufacturing that the valley earned the half-serious nickname the Belfast of the South. Nineteenth-century maps mark the Pike Mill (dyeing) and the Sallybrook Mill (woollen) on the stretch by the village. The Glansillagh Mill, built in 1842 for linen and later turning out waterproof clothing, ran until a fire destroyed it in 1990. The water that built the place is still running; the industry it powered is mostly memory now.
Seventy-six houses, then twenty
Lord Barrymore's houses and the Famine
Sallybrook in its industrial heyday was a workers' village. By 1841 Lord Barrymore had built up to seventy-six houses here, lived in by the families who worked the mills. Then came An Gorta Mór. By the 1851 census the settlement had collapsed to around twenty structures - the population gone to the grave or the boat. Twenty houses that survive today are more than a century and a half old. They were originally part of the Smith Barry estate, whose seat was over on Fota Island near Cobh; when the estate was broken up the mill families eventually bought their own homes. It is an ordinary-looking row of houses with an extraordinary century behind it.