The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 labels it a flour mill; by the 1948 revision it had become a saw mill. The change in designation is a small detail, but it hints at a longer story of continuous use and adaptation on this particular stretch of water.

The paper trail reaches back well before either map. A Down Survey map of 1655 to 1656, drawn up by George Marshall and copied by Daniel O'Brien, plots two watermills associated with Callan, one to the north of the Kings River and one to the south, just outside the eastern end of the town. That southern mill corresponds to this site. A deed of 1556 records Thomas, Earl of Ormond, granting to Sir William Wheelane, a priest, two water mills at Callan, described as one within the town and one without, suggesting the site was already of some standing by the mid-sixteenth century. The most intriguing thread, however, connects the mill to the Augustinian friary that once stood in Callan. When the monastery was surrendered in 1540, its inventory included a water mill, then described as being in ruins and called the New Mill, along with a small parcel of ground called the Inch. A note attached to that inventory records that both the mill and the inch were concealed by Sir Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond and Knight of the Garter, a detail that suggests the dissolution of the friary was not an entirely straightforward transfer of property. A deed of 1578 adds texture to the landscape: Thomas, Earl of Ormond, granting to Edmund Butler fitz Theobald an island on the east side of the new mill, lying between the millrace and the old course of the river, described as then sown with corn. Immediately north of the mill site, a narrow sliver of island still exists in the river, roughly ninety metres long and no more than ten metres wide at its broadest point, and this is almost certainly the same inch referenced across those sixteenth-century documents. The friary itself was leased to James Butler and Thomas Butler in 1541 and granted to them outright in 1557 to 1558, folding the mill and its associated land into a broader pattern of post-dissolution Butler consolidation in the area.