It is a small, telling detail about a building that has always been more complicated than it first appears. The structure's ground plan is Z-shaped, the result of stone additions at either end of the original rectangular core, and modern construction at the north-western end now sits directly over the old wheel-pit, burying the mechanism that once drove the whole operation.

By the time the six-inch Ordnance Survey map was drawn in 1842, the building was already recorded as a flour mill, though local tradition holds that it was used to grind maize during the nineteenth century. Maize milling was not uncommon in Ireland during and after the Famine period, when Indian meal became a significant part of the food supply, and a mill capable of processing it would have been a working piece of that broader story. Glenbower lake, which lies to the north-west, served as the mill pond, feeding water along a mill race, the channel that directed flow to the wheel, to power the machinery. The lake was drained in the late 1980s, and a section of that same mill race has since been incorporated into a public walkway. The mill itself continued in use as a corn store until 1971, a long afterlife for a building that had already been standing for well over a century.