But the mill race beside it still flows, and the wheel-pit cut into the western gable is still there, making it possible to read the building's original purpose even through decades of agricultural repurposing. It was built as a fulling mill, which was a specific stage in the production of woollen cloth. Raw woven fabric was soaked and then beaten, traditionally by heavy wooden hammers driven by a waterwheel, to mat the fibres together and produce a denser, more weatherproof textile. These were industrial buildings tied directly to the local wool trade, and they required a reliable water supply, which this tributary of the Bride clearly provided.

The structure itself is modest in scale, measuring roughly 10.7 metres east to west and 6 metres north to south, a single storey with gabled ends. It appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which places it firmly in the pre-Famine landscape of east Cork, when small-scale textile processing was still woven into rural economic life. The survival of the mill race as a working channel is the more remarkable detail. Water management infrastructure of this kind, the earthworks and stone-lined leats that diverted streams to power machinery, often silts up or is deliberately filled in once a mill falls out of use. Here it has kept flowing, a small functional remnant of a process that otherwise left very little trace on the landscape.