The corn mill and a tuck mill, used for finishing woven cloth, sat roughly 150 metres apart, both recorded as derelict before the Victorian era had properly taken hold. The tuck mill vanished from later maps entirely, leaving the corn mill as the sole survivor of what was evidently an earlier industrial cluster along this quiet Cork waterway.

The Howards rebuilt the corn mill in 1870, and what stands today reflects that late nineteenth-century reconstruction. The rectangular stone structure measures 15.2 metres east to west and 8 metres north to south, with brick-arched window openings that were a practical and relatively economical feature of the period. Along the western gable, the wheel-pit, roughly 2 metres wide and 3 metres deep, once housed a high breastshot or overshot waterwheel, meaning water struck the wheel near the top or from above, generating considerable turning force. Inside, a pit for the pit-wheel, the large gear that transferred the waterwheel's rotation to the milling machinery, is still visible along an internal wall. By 1902 the mill appeared on the Ordnance Survey map under the name Hornhill Corn Mill, suggesting it was operating and well enough regarded to earn a place name. That working life came to an end in 1910, when the mill was abandoned. No machinery or gearing survives, and the building has since been absorbed into agricultural use as a farm structure. Hornhill bridge lies a short distance to the west, a reminder that this was once a spot where several functions of rural infrastructure converged.