Best thing since before sliced bread...

This week saw the sad closing of one of the Boyne Valleys oldest food processing companies, Spicers Bakery. Navan is where the Blackwater and the Boyne meet and this mix of rushing water has been used for centuries to power different industries, and perhaps the most important of these were the water-mills. The first water-mill in Ireland was supposedly built by King Cormac Mac Art in the Boyne Valley in the 2nd century AD. His favourite concubine was in the bad books with his jealous wife and she was ordered to grind the grain for the whole royal site of Tara. This is why Cormac had the mill built. These were revolutionary machines when you think that rural people still used the more ancient stone quern method of grinding grain into flour right up until the early 20th century. Mills were referred to by historians as "the backbone of Irish industry". Although the present Spicers bakery  was originally the cornstore for the mill, it is still an impressive building. It is a detached six bay four story construction with exposed rubble walls that are whitewashed and which dates from the 1860s.

The mill itself was converted to apartments during the last boom era and it is ironic that it was built in a previous boom. At the time (1785) it was one of the biggest mills in Ireland and it required a considerable amount of capital investment to build these. Records show that there were ten pairs of stones in the original mill, six for wheat and four for oats. The video below shows a typical working water powered flour mill from the Blackwater area.

This large investment was low-risk because bread was fast becoming the staple diet for the new urban workers during the industrial revolution. Before that, bread had been a luxury. The Napoleonic Wars also meant that Britain was dependent on Ireland for its bread. This was why the Irish parliament offered 3d per mile to transport flour to Dublin. This was over twice the price for wheat. Meath was the first county to start sending flour to the capital and this helped its transport infrastructure grow. The Boyne Navigation Canal is a good example of this and it was owned by Spicers until the 1960s. Milling was a profitable business during the 19th century, with over 2500 recorded as being built between 1835 and 1850 in Ireland. There was a downside to this though. Millers wanted all local grinding to be carried out in their mills. That is why we find so many smashed stone querns reused in stone walls and dumped for archaeologists to find. The milling industry also demanded economic protection from the cheap imports which were being processed in the giant mills of Chicago and the American West. This they got, courtesy of the Corn Laws, and they made a killing from it. Unfortunately, the corn laws were not such a good idea during the famine. Eventually, cheap white bread began to flood the market in the 1880s and this heralded the death knell of the mills.
Spicers changed from a mill to a bakery in 1880 and they had depots in Trim and Balbriggan aswell. During the 1970s they employed over 300 people and generations of Loreto convent girls who went to school across the road from the bakery have never forgotten memories of the smell of fresh bread while they studied.