The building itself is not the first attempt at milling here: local tradition holds that the Herrick family originally built a mill about a kilometre further south-west, close to a weir that appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. That earlier mill no longer survives, and the reason it was abandoned is straightforward enough, the water simply could not provide sufficient head, meaning there was not enough of a drop in the stream to drive the machinery effectively. So the operation moved to its present location, already recorded on the same 1842 map as Bellmount Mills.

The Howards leased the mill from the Herricks in 1848, at which point power came from an overshot water wheel, a type in which water is delivered to the top of the wheel rather than the bottom, giving it considerably more force. That wheel measured twenty-six feet in diameter and seven feet in length, a substantial piece of engineering for a rural Cork mill. The wheel pit survives along the western gable, with the mill pond behind it. By the early twentieth century the wheel had been supplemented or replaced by a Gilbert, Gilkes and Gordon turbine producing fifty-two horsepower, driving the machinery inside through a pulley and belt system. A National Gas and Diesel engine followed in 1926, and electricity took over entirely after 1958, at which point both the turbine and engine were removed. The mill's internal evolution is visible in its fabric: a grain drying kiln at the western end of the south wall was repurposed as a carpenter's workshop in the early twentieth century, and a later addition at the eastern end now houses two pairs of French burr millstones, a hard-wearing stone quarried in the Paris Basin and widely favoured for flour milling, here set on iron tables and installed in the 1920s. They are still in place, now electrically driven with modern spindles fitted beneath them. A pair of semi-detached, two-storey mill houses from the early nineteenth century stand to the north and remain occupied.