One of them is known locally as "the maltings", a name that hints at a past life in whiskey production, though by the early twentieth century the whole complex had shifted its identity entirely. What began as a distillery had, somewhere between 1842 and 1902, reinvented itself as a brewery, a change recorded matter-of-factly by the different labels applied to it on successive Ordnance Survey maps.

The complex dates from the early to mid-nineteenth century. The 1842 OS six-inch map marks it as a distillery, and the surviving buildings suggest a working industrial site of some ambition. The larger of the two remaining structures is a gable-ended rectangular building constructed into the slope of the ground, a practical arrangement that would have allowed gravity to assist the movement of materials through the production process. Its north elevation rises to four storeys across eleven bays, while the south side, shaped by the slope, presents only three storeys. The windows on that south elevation are camber-headed with brick arches, a small architectural detail that gives the facade a degree of care unusual in purely functional buildings. Each floor of the west gable has a wide central doorway, suggesting the regular loading and unloading of goods at every level. A second, three-storey structure to the northwest sits with its long axis running east to west, close to the stream, and is now used as a garage. By the time the 1902 OS map was surveyed, the whole complex was being recorded as a brewery rather than a distillery, indicating a genuine change in what was being produced there rather than simply a cartographic error.