A Quaker dynasty
The Malcomsons
David Malcomson came down from Lurgan in the 1790s, made his money in corn-milling, and in 1825 leased Mayfield in Portlaw to convert a derelict ironworks into a cotton factory. He brought his sons, his Quaker meeting, and a way of running a town that came with it: schools for the workers' children, sick clubs, a temperance hall, no pub on the company street. By the 1850s the mill employed over a thousand workers directly and shaped the village around it. The family went on to build ships in Waterford and run the Neptune Iron Works.
Cotton, then leather, then silence
Mayfield Mill
The mill's main weaving shed was once said to be the largest single-roofed space in the British Isles — 260 feet by 40. The Malcomson cotton operation went into trouble in the 1860s with the American Civil War, took another hit in the 1866 Overend Gurney collapse, and the company was liquidated in 1876, costing the village over a thousand jobs. Small-scale textile production continued until 1904 and a creamery operated in the buildings until 1914. Irish Tanners Ltd reopened the site in 1932. At its peak the tannery employed about 600 people and was, for a while, the largest in Europe. It closed in 1985 and has been derelict ever since. Plans for the site come and go.
A village's calling card
The Portlaw roofs
The signature feature of the workers' cottages is a low, vaulted, slate-tile-fronted roof — wooden ribs bent into a dome, sheeted with tar and calico, then faced with overlapping slate tiles. Cheap, watertight, and made from things the mill produced anyway. They are called Portlaw roofs, they are unique to the village, and a fair number of the surviving examples now have protected-structure status. The best run is along George's Street; the heritage centre will point out the rest.
Eight hundred years next door
The Beresfords
Curraghmore has been the seat of the de la Poer and Beresford families since the twelfth century in one form or another. The current house was raised around the original Norman tower house — the tower is still embedded in the central block — and the demesne was laid out by the 1st Earl of Tyrone around 1750, with the formal French garden in front of the house attributed to Louisa, third Lady Waterford. James Wyatt redecorated the principal interior rooms in the late 1770s on his one visit to Ireland. The shell house in the grounds, built in 1754 by the Countess of Tyrone over the course of several years, is decorated inside with shells she collected herself. The estate has its own distillery now, making single-estate whiskey from grain grown on the demesne.