They recorded it simply as a windmill stump on the six-inch map, a label that has stuck ever since, and that gives the site a slightly melancholy precision: not a ruin, not a tower, but a stump, something that implies a larger thing now missing.

What survives at Clonmines is a cylindrical stone tower of three storeys, with an external diameter of just under five metres and an internal diameter of just under three. The walls are thick, as you would expect of a structure built to absorb the torque of turning machinery overhead. Four slit windows pierce the upper floors, and the floors themselves were once supported on corbels and rebates, the corbels being stone brackets projecting from the wall face, the rebates being recessed ledges that received the floor timbers. A stone stair climbs anti-clockwise from the western doorway to the second floor, projecting inward from the wall rather than rising in a separate stairwell. The tower is thought to date from the eighteenth century, when windmills were a common feature of exposed coastal promontories in the south-east of Ireland. The site sits on a local high point, with the north-western shore of Bannow Bay roughly three hundred metres to the south-east, which would have given the mill a reasonable exposure to prevailing winds off the water.

The surviving height is just over four and a half metres, and the opposing doorways at ground level are damaged, but enough of the fabric remains to make the structure legible. The corbels and the internal stair in particular give a clear sense of how the interior was organised when the mill was still operating.