The tunnel itself is partially collapsed and barely half a metre high, more of a compressed brick passage than anything a person could move through easily. It is one of the stranger survivals in a complex that has quietly changed identity more than once, shifting from cloth production to starch manufacture across the span of a few decades, leaving behind a scatter of walls, platforms, and datestones that do not quite add up to a single coherent story.

By 1842, when the first detailed Ordnance Survey maps were made at the six-inch scale, the site was already substantial enough to be recorded as a Bleach and Cloth Mill, an industrial designation indicating the processing and finishing of textile cloth. The tunnel to the chimney appears on that same map, suggesting the flue arrangement was integral to the original layout rather than a later addition. By the time the 1902 and 1935 surveys were made, the complex had become Silversprings Starch Works, a shift that speaks to the broader flux in Irish rural industry during the late nineteenth century. A datestone of 1897 on the east gable of a one-storey structure at the eastern edge of the complex marks what was presumably a phase of rebuilding or expansion; the brick quoins and window surrounds of that building sit alongside the older roofless main structure, which measures roughly ten metres east to west externally, with a tall archway in its east wall and a raised platform, about 1.7 metres high, at its western end. A residential house, apparently late nineteenth or early twentieth century in date, occupies the centre of the complex, which gives the whole site an oddly layered quality, domestic and industrial remains folded in together.