The site in Donnybrook East, bordered to the east by the River Dodder, was listed as a 'site of mill race' in Dublin's City Development Plan as recently as 1991, meaning that even as the city modernised around it, planners recognised that something industrial and earlier still ran beneath the surface.

When the site was earmarked for development as a bakery by Johnston Mooney and O'Brien, a pre-development archaeological assessment carried out in 1995 by Gowen confirmed what the planning records had suggested. Archaeologists uncovered a section of culverted millrace, or watercourse, running through the site. A millrace is the channel that carries water from a river or stream to power a watermill, and this one had been built to a substantial specification: the walls were constructed of regularly coursed stonework, 0.8 metres thick and standing to 1.8 metres in height, and the channel itself measured 8 metres in width. It had also been divided internally into two sections. The proximity of the River Dodder, which has powered several mills along its length through south Dublin and into the city, makes the location entirely logical, though the precise history of the mill it once served is not recorded in the available sources.

The site today is not a place where visitors can inspect the millrace directly; it was assessed as part of a commercial development process, and the remains lie beneath what became an operational bakery premises. Its interest is more archival than experiential. For anyone researching Dublin's industrial waterscape, the Gowen 1995 report offers the most specific surviving record of the structure's dimensions and construction. The Dodder corridor as a whole, however, is walkable and rewards attention, with several documented mill sites along its banks that speak to the river's long working life before the city filled in around it.