Three storeys of it are original; the fourth was added later when somebody decided a windmill made a reasonable house. Whether any fabric of the original mill survives within those walls is, by most accounts, doubtful. The structure was noted on the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, labelled in the careful italic lettering that cartographers reserved for antiquities and features of note, simply as a Wind Mill.

The mill's history reaches back at least to 1635, when a "molendinar", the Latin-derived term for a mill used in older legal and property documents, was recorded among the possessions of James Codd of Ballyumphane at his death. The name Ballysheen itself carries traces of this milling past, and the site appears to have remained a working landmark for centuries. By around 1930, however, the mill was effectively being dismantled by degrees: iron machinery from Ballysheen was transferred to the windmill at Tacumshin, near Fence, which survives today as one of the few intact windmills in Ireland. Two millstones from Ballysheen found their way to Enniscorthy Castle, where they were kept, separated from the structure they once drove.

What remains at Ballysheen is a building that has outgrown its original purpose so thoroughly that the mill is almost incidental to it. Its working parts are elsewhere, distributed between a functioning mill and a castle, while the tower itself became a home. It is a quiet example of how rural industrial buildings were rarely demolished so much as quietly repurposed, their components redistributed across the landscape until the original whole becomes almost impossible to reconstruct.