The two-storey shell that survives on the southern bank of the Awbeg River in Doonawanly, north County Cork, was different. It went through at least four distinct industrial lives before falling silent, and the machinery that drove all of them, a wooden axle with iron gudgeon, the shaft, and a cast-iron pit-wheel nearly two metres in diameter, still lies inside the roofless walls, slowly being reclaimed by vegetation.

The mill was the project of a man described by the local historian Grove White as a "local eccentric", one Johnny Roche, who put the building through a restless series of reinventions. He began with woollen and flannel production, then shifted to sawing timber, then to cutting stone, and finally settled on grinding corn, the use that gave the ruin its current name. The wheel that powered all of this was an undershot type, meaning the current of the Awbeg struck the lower paddles of the wheel rather than falling from above, and it was fed by a weir built directly into the river on the north-east side of the building. A lintelled channel, a stone-lined passage capped with flat slabs, runs beneath the north-east end of the mill, and a large conglomerate bedstone, the lower of the two grinding stones that would have crushed the grain, lies on the ground to the south-east. Roche died in 1884, and the mill ceased working with him. Ordnance Survey maps capture the building's shifting identity in miniature: the 1842 six-inch edition labels it "Old Corn Mill and Kiln", while by 1905 the same structure had been mapped as a creamery, suggesting some use or reuse in the intervening years that the walls themselves no longer explain.

The ruin sits just north of a place called Castle Curious, which, given the history of its neighbour, feels entirely appropriate.