The man who recorded it, Sir Henry Piers of Tristernagh, was a gentleman antiquary with a keen eye for the practical geography of his surroundings, and his account of the Gaine traces the river through a sequence of mills and crossings that reveals how industrially active this modest waterway once was.

Piers described the river passing under what he called "another large bridge" at Multyfarnham before continuing to a mill and then watering the grounds of what he referred to as the "late Friery," meaning the Franciscan friary whose buildings still stand in the village. His account was later published by the antiquarian Charles Vallancey in 1786. The phrase "late Friery" reflects the friary's suppression during the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the site never fully fell out of use. Together, the bridge, the mill, and the friary grounds form a small cluster of features that Piers captured in a single sentence, suggesting a riverside economy that depended on the Gaine in very practical ways. That the bridge warranted the word "large" implies something of some substance rather than a simple ford or stepping-stone crossing.