It is the kind of detail that raises questions without answering them, a carved face folded into an industrial building, its origins and meaning absorbed into the fabric of the structure around it. When that mill was eventually demolished, the head went with it, and the site is now occupied by later 19th and 20th-century buildings.

The mill itself has a traceable, if fragmentary, history. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records a 'mill Greist', meaning a grist mill where grain was ground, listed among the properties of the Manor of Ardfynane. At that time the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore held the manor as proprietor, with a man named Richard Butler as leaseholder. The mill appears to have stood on the western side of Ardfinnan bridge, at its northern end, and what is thought to be the same building turns up in a sketch by the antiquarian Francis Grose, published in 1791. Grose was known for documenting Irish and British antiquities in the late 18th century, and his drawings, though sometimes idealistic in approach, remain useful records of structures that no longer survive. The sketch places the mill in a recognisable relationship with the bridge, offering one of the few visual traces of a building that otherwise left only documentary and archaeological fragments behind.

The sculpted head that was embedded in the mill's masonry survives as a separately recorded object, though its current whereabouts and the circumstances of its original placement remain unclear from what little documentation exists. Whether it was reused from an earlier structure, a common enough practice in medieval and post-medieval building, or carved specifically for the mill, is an open question.