Without knowing what to look for, you would walk straight past it. The circular base, some 18.5 metres in diameter, sits within a surrounding ditch, and together these features preserve the ghost of a structure that ground grain for a farming community somewhere in the post-1700 landscape of the Dublin coast.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837, one of the most systematic cartographic exercises ever undertaken in Ireland, which means the mill was already a known landmark, or perhaps already a ruin, when surveyors passed through Ballough in the early nineteenth century. The ditch encircling the base is still visible today, though it is shallower than it once was; the landowner noted that it had been considerably deeper before levelling work was carried out around 1985. At that point the ditch measured roughly eight metres wide and forty centimetres deep, reduced from what would once have been a more pronounced earthwork. The site was documented by archaeologist Geraldine Stout, whose notes form the basis of the formal record.

Ballough is a quiet coastal townland, and the site sits in agricultural ground that is not set up for visitors in any formal sense. There are no markers or interpretive panels. The raised circular platform is the thing to look for, low and subtle against the surrounding field, and the slight depression of the ditch around it. The area is best approached with the landowner's awareness, and the detail that repays attention is the scale of that base diameter, nearly nineteen metres across, which gives a sense of how substantial the original tower must have been before it disappeared entirely from the ground above.