The document in question is the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a Cromwellian-era cadastral survey that recorded landholdings across Ireland in the aftermath of conquest. What it describes at Ballyartella is a small but evidently functional rural economy, already partially in ruin, gathered around a tower house and a watercourse capable of powering more than one mill.

The lands of Ballyartella were listed in 1640 as belonging to the Countess of Ormond, connecting the townland to one of the most powerful Anglo-Norman dynasties in Munster. The mills mentioned in the survey are the ancestors, in one way or another, of the structures that survive today. The ruins of a post-medieval mill building still stand roughly 19 metres to the north-east of the Ballyartella tower house, and it is possible that this structure either occupies the footprint of the earlier mill or incorporates some of its original fabric. Just 16 metres to the north-west, the Hanly's Woollen Mill complex was still operating as a working mill, a rare example of industrial continuity on a site with documented milling activity going back at least four centuries. An Ordnance Survey map from the 1901 to 1905 revision labels the building as Ballyartella Mill (Woollen), suggesting the transition from grain milling to textile production had already taken place by the late nineteenth century. Whether the medieval mills stood precisely on these spots or elsewhere within the townland remains an open question, the landscape having quietly rearranged itself around the evidence.