The pond itself is thought to be a remnant of the levelled watercourse or tail race of a corn mill that appears on the 1837 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, and the milling tradition here may reach back further still, into the medieval period.

The earliest documentary evidence comes from 1612, when Robert Dillon of Cannorstown was granted, among other things, a castle, a bawn (an enclosing defensive wall or courtyard typical of early plantation-era settlement), a mill, and twenty houses in the townland of Cumerstown. That grant, recorded in the Calendar of Patent Rolls for the reign of James I, places a working mill firmly in this landscape at the opening of the seventeenth century. Seventy years later, the Co. Westmeath antiquary Sir Henry Piers of Tristernagh described the eastern end of Lough Lene with the precision of someone who had walked the ground himself. Writing in 1682, he noted that from that end of the lough there issued a considerable stream which, within a quarter of a mile, turned a mill at Cummestown. His account was later published in Charles Vallancey's Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis in 1786. The stream Piers described was the mill's power source, and the pond that survives today is likely a trace of the infrastructure built to manage and direct that water.