What makes it mildly intriguing is less what it is now than what it may once have been. A scholar writing in 1936 proposed that the structure, by then functioning as a mill weir to manage water flow for milling purposes, could in an earlier form have served as a fishing weir, the kind of low barrier built across a river to trap or direct fish, a practice with roots going back well into medieval Ireland.

The suggestion comes from Lyons, writing in 1936, and rests on the word "anciently", which implies an older use without quite proving one. The weir does not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed between 1840 and 1841, which places its construction somewhere after that date in its current form at least. That absence from the mid-nineteenth-century map is itself a small piece of evidence; the Ordnance Survey of that period was meticulous about recording water infrastructure, so if the weir had existed in recognisable form by 1840, it almost certainly would have been marked. The gap between a possible ancient fishing weir and a post-1840 mill weir is wide enough that any direct continuity remains unproven, and the historical evidence is considered too thin to classify the structure as an archaeological monument.