This was once a carding mill, a facility used to process raw wool by combing the fibres into alignment before spinning. Unlike the more celebrated corn or flour mills of the Irish countryside, carding mills were often modest, functional structures serving local farming communities, and they have survived in far smaller numbers.

The building itself is three bays wide and a single storey tall, with a later addition to its eastern side. What makes it genuinely unusual is the degree to which its working parts remain in place. The wheel pit along the southern gable, measuring 1.65 metres in width, still contains a wooden axle 0.4 metres in diameter, a survival that is rare in any watermill. More remarkable still, a pair of carding drums, the toothed cylinders that actually did the fibre-combing work, have also survived on site. Water was drawn to the mill via a mill race, a channel cut to redirect river flow, taken from the Ownagappul to the south of the building.

The site is now in agricultural use, which has almost certainly contributed to the preservation of its fabric by keeping the structure inhabited and maintained, even if no longer for its original purpose. Visitors in the area should expect a working farmyard rather than a curated heritage site, and the interior machinery would not ordinarily be accessible. Even from the exterior, the wheel pit and the general form of the building offer a readable trace of how rural textile processing once operated along a small West Cork river.