The date plaque on the store reads 1870, but the story of the site begins nearly half a century earlier, and most of what was built in those first decades has since been levelled or rebuilt, leaving the complex as a layered palimpsest of an industry that once defined much of Cork's hinterland.

George Allman established the distillery here at Moanarone in 1825, laying out a large complex on a split level around a central yard enclosed by high walls. The choice of location was practical: the tributary provided water, a resource as fundamental to distilling as the grain itself, and the proximity to Bandon gave access to markets and transport. Allman's name was well established in the Cork whiskey trade, and the scale of the enterprise, with its split-level yard and enclosing walls, suggests serious commercial ambition from the outset. Much of what Allman built in those early years was subsequently altered or replaced, which is typical of industrial sites that remained in productive use across the nineteenth century. The north-west range of residential and commercial structures survives in notably good condition, offering a sense of how the working community of such a complex was housed and organised alongside the production itself. The corn store to the south-west, with its five storeys and its 1870 datestone, represents a later phase of investment, the kind of substantial grain storage that would have been necessary to supply a busy distillery and perhaps to serve the wider agricultural economy of the Bandon valley.