Explore the Historic Newmills Corn and Flax Mills Near Letterkenny 🌾

While their trip to the USA was cancelled courtesy of the Aer Lingus pilot strike it didn't stop Farming Life's Darryl Armitage and his wife getting away for a week to Co Donegal.<br />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 owned at Draperstown.<br />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.<br />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.<br />The waterwheel that drove the corn mill can still be seen in action. It is one of the largest working waterwheels in the country.