No stonework, no wheel-pit, no standing walls. Yet the ground here almost certainly carries the footprint of a corn mill that was already old when an Elizabethan earl passed by in 1558, and which appears on maps made two centuries apart in much the same position, doing much the same work.

The earliest written reference comes from that 1558 visit, when the Earl of Sussex and his retinue passed through what the account called an old abbey and a mill known as Onin O'Mollrye. Nearly a century later, both the Down Survey map of 1656 and the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 place a functioning corn mill here as part of a small but evidently organised settlement. The Down Survey, a mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned to record land ownership across Ireland, depicted the mill on the north bank of the Mulkear with a large waterwheel shown on the gable end, alongside a stone bridge, a cluster of thatched dwellings on both banks, and the partly thatched ruins of Owneybeg Abbey. The Civil Survey described the parish as a manor town with the privilege of a Court Leet and Court Baron, an arrangement granting local judicial and administrative powers, along with the river, the bridge, a mill, two fishing weirs, a demolished stone house, and two orchards. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1840, a mill was still recorded at or very near the same spot, suggesting either continuity of use or rebuilding on the same ground.

Today, the site is one for those comfortable reading absence as evidence. No structure from the mill shown on the 1840 map survives above ground. What the record does offer is aerial photography: Cambridge University photographs taken in 1968 show a water-filled linear ditch to the east of the mill site and a linear earthwork to the west, both of which may represent the remains of the mill-race, the channel that would have directed water onto the wheel. The site sits approximately 70 metres south of Abbey Owney, which itself rewards a visit. Anyone approaching with an interest in the mill should look to the ground rather than upward, and perhaps carry a copy of the 1656 Down Survey map for comparison.