Most people who pass it would see only a fragment of old stonework doing duty as a boundary marker. What it actually represents is the last trace of a mill that was already old enough to appear on a seventeenth-century map.

The Down Survey barony map of Corcomroe, drawn up between 1658 and 1659 as part of the Cromwellian land settlement's effort to document and redistribute Irish territory, shows a mill with a waterwheel on the shore of Lickeen Lough, labelled with no great ceremony as simply "a mill". The fast-flowing Ballymacravan River, which runs through this stretch of landscape, would have supplied the energy. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1840, the site had acquired a more specific identity: the "Corn and Tuck Mill". The double designation is telling. A corn mill ground grain, while a tuck mill, also called a fulling mill, was used to clean and consolidate freshly woven woollen cloth by pounding it in water, a process that thickened and strengthened the fabric. Operating both functions from a single site, presumably using the same water source, was a practical arrangement that speaks to how thoroughly rural communities once organised the mechanical work of daily life around whatever river power was available to them.