Taking home-grown food philosophy to the ends of the earth

Slap bang in the middle of the Connolly’s Red Mills site is a house that refuses to go away. There was a time when it wasn’t surrounded by the monumental infrastructure of the modern animal feed business, but now it stands, obstinately, stubbornly, dwarfed by the buildings that have grown around it, yet in no mood to surrender its ground.

Ann Connolly has lived here for 64 years and, like the house, has no intention of going anywhere, despite the noise and the bustle and the perpetual disturbance. “I’d be disturbed if there was no noise,” she points out, and that’s the end of the matter.

There has been a mill on this land in Goresbridge, County Kilkenny since 1758, and when Michael Connolly returned from two decades as an Irish immigrant working for a French racehorse trainer in New York, he bought the business and named it William Connolly and Sons Ltd.