By the time a survey team visited in June 1994, the site was so overgrown that no structures could be made out at all, and locals recalled that the millwheel itself had last been visible around thirty years before that. The mill had not so much fallen into ruin as been absorbed by the landscape.

The earliest written record of a mill here comes from the 1654 to 1656 Civil Survey of Dublin, which noted a mill standing on lands belonging to Elizabeth Talbott of Malahide, described as an English Papist. In 1641 the property was valued at three pounds per annum, a modest but not insignificant sum for the period. By the time John Rocque was compiling his detailed map of County Dublin in 1760, the mill was marked as Bawther Mill, placed approximately 1.2 kilometres to the north-east of Garristown church. Rocque's map also shows the watercourse clearly, running north-east from the village and onto what is now Baldwinstown Road, and the characteristic bend in the tail race, the channel that carries water away from a mill after it has turned the wheel, is still legible on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch maps and on satellite imagery taken between 2011 and 2013. Folklore gathered from Garristown School, preserved in the national Schools' Collection, identifies the mill as a flax mill and notes that its location was pointed out locally at a place called Bother Lane, a name that appears to preserve the older Bawther form.

The site itself sits roughly 1.2 kilometres north-east of Garristown church, and the watercourse that fed the mill can still be traced as it threads through the village and out along Baldwinstown Road. The millrace was recorded as dry in 1994, and there is no indication that any standing structure has re-emerged since. The OSi historical maps, freely accessible online, are the most useful tool for orientating yourself, as the bend in the tail race gives a precise fix on where the mill once stood. Bother Lane is the name to look for on the ground, and the watercourse itself, even in its diminished state, traces the same path it followed when the wheel was still turning.