Fulling was the process by which woven wool was pounded, usually with heavy wooden hammers driven by a waterwheel, to clean and thicken the fabric. It was skilled, water-dependent work, and the mills that supported it tend to leave behind only modest traces in the landscape, easily overlooked as rubble.

What survives here is modest but coherent. The mill structure measures roughly 6.8 metres in length and 3.6 metres in width, and although its walls have partially collapsed, the wheel-pit along the western wall is still discernible. More striking, perhaps, is the earthen banked mill-race channel, the man-made cut that diverted water from the river to drive the wheel, which remains largely intact. Mill-races of this kind were carefully engineered features, and the fact that the earthworks have held their shape while the building itself has crumbled says something about the effort that went into constructing them. The Rathruane River would have provided the reliable flow needed to keep the operation running, and the wider area around Ballydehob was part of a landscape where small-scale industrial sites like this once served local farming and textile communities.