It appears in the written terrier accompanying the 1659 Down Survey map of Farbill Barony as simply 'one Cornmill' in Clonfad, a name that was later reassigned and absorbed into the present townland of Rattin. The Down Survey, carried out in the 1650s under William Petty to catalogue confiscated Irish lands for redistribution, produced some of the earliest detailed cartographic records of the country's rural infrastructure, and its terriers, the written schedules accompanying the maps, occasionally preserve references to working buildings that left little other trace. This particular mill is one of them.

The 1659 entry is the first mention, but the story does not quite end there. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1837, a corn mill was marked in an area still annotated as 'Clonfad', situated roughly 835 metres south-west of Clonfad church and graveyard, and about 1.4 kilometres north-west of Rattin Castle. Whether the building shown on that Victorian map was the same structure noted nearly two centuries earlier, or a later mill built on the footprint of an older one, remains an open question. The continuity of the place-name across both sources is suggestive, but the physical location of the original mill has never been confirmed on the ground.