The standing buildings are substantial enough, a cluster of two and three-storey rubble limestone structures arranged around a courtyard beside Lickbla House, but the older, vanished mill they may overlie connects this quiet rural site to several centuries of documented milling activity that most visitors would have no reason to suspect.

The paper trail begins in 1558, when a land grant to Sir Richard Nugent, Baron of Delvin, listed among his holdings 'a water-mill in Likebla'. By 1647, there were apparently two mills operating in the townland. That year, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, a levy was imposed on a group of Westmeath mills to fund Captain Ignatius Nugent of the Irish Confederate Army, the Catholic royalist coalition that controlled much of Ireland during the 1640s. The portion assessed against 'Lady of Glancoe, or her tenants, two mills in Lickbla' came to £3 5s 4d, a modest but telling sum that places Lickbla within the wartime economy of mid-seventeenth-century Ireland. The corn and flax mill complex visible today was built around 1790 and extended circa 1840. Flax milling, which processed the plant used to make linen, was common across Ireland during this period, and the combination of corn and flax processing under one roof reflects the mixed agricultural economy of the time. The buildings retain pitched natural slate roofs, cast-iron rainwater goods, red brick dressings around the openings, and the remains of diamond-pane cast-iron windows. A double-arched rubble limestone bridge carries a path over the tailrace, the channel that carries water away after it has passed through the mill machinery, to the east of the complex. Wrought-iron double gates on circular limestone piers mark the western entrance.

The site sits set back from the road in mature grounds, screened enough that the courtyard arrangement and the bridge over the tailrace are not immediately obvious from the road frontage. The boundary walls and gate piers along the northwest are themselves built of coursed rubble limestone, giving the whole ensemble a coherent, if quietly faded, character. The mill complex is no longer in operation, and the relationship between the surviving buildings and the medieval mill recorded in the 1558 grant remains a matter of reasonable inference rather than confirmed archaeology.