The timbers, recovered during archaeological work ahead of the N30 road realignment at Templescoby, are among the quieter surprises that infrastructure projects occasionally push to the surface, and in this case the surprise dates to the early medieval period.

The excavation, carried out under licence reference 04E0322, recovered eight large timbers from a confined area during construction work, three of which are considered likely to belong to the main structure of the mill itself. A horizontal-wheeled mill, as distinct from the more familiar vertical waterwheel, uses a flat or angled wheel set directly in the flow of a mill-race, with the shaft running straight up to the millstone above, a simple and efficient design that was widespread across early medieval Ireland. Further monitoring on site identified additional timbers and a palaeo-channel, essentially a buried remnant of an ancient watercourse, which was sampled in the hope that it might preserve part of the tailrace, the channel that carried water away from the wheel after use. Dendrochronological analysis, which dates timber by reading the pattern of annual growth rings, placed the felling of the trees used in construction at AD 745 plus or minus nine years and AD 771 plus or minus nine years, according to the findings published by Bangerter in 2008. That puts the mill firmly in the eighth century, a period when such horizontal mills were a common fixture of the Irish countryside, grinding grain for monastic communities and secular settlements alike.