Mills of this kind, which harnessed the flow of a river to turn grinding stones for grain or to power other industrial processes, were essential features of the pre-modern Irish landscape, and their placement alongside bridges was no accident. A crossing point drew traffic, traffic meant trade, and a reliable current meant power.

The historian F. E. Ball, writing in 1903, recorded the existence of a bridge over the Dodder at Rathfarnham as far back as 1381, making this one of the earlier documented crossings in the area south of Dublin. The mill is believed to have stood alongside that same bridge, at the point where the road led towards the city, and it survived in some form until the mid-nineteenth century. The precise details of who operated it, what it ground, and when exactly it fell out of use have not survived in the written record, but the association between the bridge site and the mill location is considered the most plausible reading of the available evidence, according to researcher Rob Goodbody.

Rathfarnham today is a suburban village on the southern edge of Dublin city, and the Dodder still runs through it, though much altered and managed since the days when a mill wheel would have turned in its current. The bridge itself, or rather a successor to the medieval crossing, remains a useful landmark for orienting yourself. Visitors with an interest in industrial archaeology or medieval topography should look to the riverbanks near the old bridge crossing; nothing of the mill structure is known to survive, but the relationship between the water, the road, and the crossing point still makes the logic of its original placement legible. The Dodder here is not a dramatic river, which perhaps makes it easier to imagine the quieter, more functional world in which a modest mill beside a well-used bridge would have been an entirely ordinary and necessary thing.