Skerries Mills and Where to Eat: A Practical Food Guide

Skerries has two things going for it food-wise: a genuinely unusual heritage site with a working bakery and cafe at its centre, and a small town that punches above its size for places to eat, most of them looking out over the harbour. Here is how to do both in a day.

Skerries Mills

Skerries Mills is a community heritage centre right in the middle of the town, and it is an odd and good one. It holds two windmills and a watermill together on one site, with a mill pond, mill races and wetlands around them. It is described as the only place in Europe with two windmills, a watermill and a bakery all in the one spot, which gives you a sense of how unusual the collection is.

The history runs deep. Stone-ground milling in Skerries goes back to the early 16th century, when the land belonged to the Augustinian priory of Holmpatrick, which already counted a watermill among its holdings. A lease from 1578 records that a windmill had been built by the last quarter of that century. The larger windmill, the Great Windmill of Skerries, came later, was badly damaged by storms in the 1840s, and was rebuilt as a five-sail mill that ended up on holiday posters for the town. What you see today is a restored complex bringing the five-sail windmill, four-sail windmill, watermill and bakery of the 1800s back to working order.

Milling carried on into the early 20th century, and a bakery that existed by the 1840s kept producing bread and confectionery until the mid-1980s. The Mill Bakery still bakes daily, which is the part that matters most if you are hungry.

The Watermill Cafe

The Watermill Cafe on the site is the easy lunch or coffee stop, known for its scones, cakes, tarts and traybakes, with the bakery doing the heavy lifting. You can sit in for homemade food without needing a tour ticket.

Access to the mills themselves is by guided tour only, and the tours run daily and take around 50 minutes. Booking is recommended. Opening hours are roughly 10am to 5.30pm from April to September and 10am to 4.30pm from October to March, with closures over the Christmas and New Year period. Check current times and tour availability before you go rather than relying on those exactly.

Down at the harbour

The harbour is where the town eats out. Stoop Your Head is the well-known one, a family-run seafood spot right on the harbour, with fish dishes that have won it awards over the years, including a Best Gastro Pub in Leinster nod in 2018. Expect things like seabass, prawns, mussels and crab claws, and expect it to be busy; it is popular for a reason. It generally opens daily from around noon, but check ahead.

Nearby on the harbour you will find places like The Brick House, doing tapas with an Irish slant, and 5Rock, a grill house cooking over charcoal and a wood-fired grill. Between them the harbourfront covers seafood, sharing plates and proper grilled meat within a short walk.

Cafes and a sweet stop

Olive is one of the town's better-regarded cafes, the sort of place doing good coffee, melts, smoothies and pies in a cosy room, and it is a reliable daytime stop away from the harbour crowds. Down by the harbour, Storm in a Teacup is the spot for ice cream and crepes if you are after something sweet with a sea view.

The old pubs

For a pint with some history behind it, Joe May's on Harbour Road is the one to know. It first opened in 1865 and is still run by the May family generations on, one of the older family-owned pubs in the Dublin area, with a proper local feel and live music. It is the kind of pub that makes a town rather than just sits in it.

A simple day of it

Coffee and a scone at the Watermill Cafe, a tour of the mills if you have booked one, a walk down to the harbour, seafood at Stoop Your Head or a grill at 5Rock, an ice cream from Storm in a Teacup, and a pint in Joe May's to finish. That is Skerries doing what it does well, and none of it asks you to go far. As always, check current opening days and hours before you build your day around any one place.