That description comes from the antiquarian Eugene O'Curry, who visited the site in 1837 and found the mill not in a purpose-built structure but tucked inside a neighbouring cabin, a detail that gives some sense of how reduced and informal the whole arrangement had become by that point. What made it stranger still was the evidence of age embedded in the fabric of the place: a fragment of a much older grinding stone had been worked into one of the walls, and part of the structure known as the perpendicular butment, the upright support against which a millwheel or its housing would bear, appeared to belong to an earlier phase altogether.

The mill's obscurity is compounded by a tantalising historical connection that cannot quite be confirmed. The scholar Scantlebury, writing in 1953, noted a tradition that Aengus the Culdee, a celebrated Irish monk and poet associated with the monastery at Tallaght in the eighth and ninth centuries, once worked in the kiln and mill of that monastery while living in deliberate anonymity. Culdees were members of an early Irish monastic reform movement who placed particular emphasis on ascetic practice, and manual labour of the kind Aengus is said to have performed would have fit that ethos well. Whether the mill O'Curry visited was in any way descended from or related to that monastic mill is, as the archaeological record currently stands, impossible to say. A possible millstone recorded separately under the reference DU021-037007 may also be connected, though again the evidence does not stretch to certainty.

The difficulty for anyone curious enough to go looking is considerable: the precise location of the mill is not known. O'Curry's account, as edited by Flanagan in 1927, places it near the point where a tributary stream meets a road, somewhere in the Tallaght area, but that is as close as the record gets. The possible millstone reference in the archaeological inventory offers a thread worth following for those with access to the relevant databases, and the broader landscape around the old monastery site repays attention in its own right. This is less a place to visit than a place to think about, a small vanished structure that once contained, quite literally built into its walls, the physical remains of something far older whose origins no one has been able to fully trace.