placenamesRiverstown
Baile Nua
The Cooley distillery site preserves a twentieth-century industrial history in Riverstown’s Castletowncooley area.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- Baile Nua · Irish · main form · validated name
- Riverstown · English · main form
Place & story
A state industrial project
An Environmental Protection Agency inspector’s report traces alcohol production at Castletowncooley to 1936. The state-owned Irish Alcohol Factories company, later renamed Ceimicí Teoranta, built the plant as part of a programme established under the Industrial Alcohols Act of 1934. Five factories were intended to provide employment and create an outlet for potatoes surplus to ordinary market requirements. Riverstown thus participated in an early state industrial initiative. [2]
The factory’s architecture
The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage identifies the original complex’s steel frame and bolted steel cladding. A lower entrance building rises towards a five-storey central block, with horizontal and vertical strips of windows and projecting flat concrete roofs. Some original iron windows survived its survey. These features distinguish an industrial building influenced by international design ideas of the 1930s from older stone-built mills. [3]
Conversion to whiskey production
Ceimicí Teoranta entered liquidation in 1986. The EPA report records Cooley Distillery purchasing the site in 1987 and adapting it for whiskey production. Malt whiskey production began in 1989, followed by grain whiskey in 1990. The report’s account documents a change of products within an existing industrial location, linking the earlier alcohol plant with the later distillery rather than treating them as unrelated sites. [2]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Louth
- Barony
- Dundalk Lower
- Civil parish
- Carlingford
- Within
- Castletowncooley
- Coordinates
- 53.98995, -6.21597 (approximate)
- Logainm ID
- 132332 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Riverstown. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Inspector’s report, Cooley Distillery P0826-01,4March2008,pages1–2 · Ciara Maxwell, Environmental Protection Agency
- Cooley Alcohol Factory, NIAH13900817 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
- Cooley Distillery buildings at Riverstown, County Louth, as photographed in July 2018 illustration: based on a Cooley Distillery buildings at Riverstown by Eric Jones. AI-assisted watercolour and ink adaptation; cream paper margins added, incidental clutter omitted and fine details simplified. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2026-09-19. How this page was prepared.