A mill on this site since 1432, if the tradition holds, would place it in the late medieval period, grinding grain at a time when the English Crown's grip on Ireland was contracting into the Pale and the great Anglo-Norman lordships were increasingly going their own way. That is a long continuity of purpose for a single rural spot in County Wexford.

The reputation for a mill here stretching back to 1432 comes from an anonymous source cited in 1972, so it sits in the category of local tradition rather than confirmed documentary record. What is more certain is that the structure visible today grew out of buildings constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when commercial milling expanded considerably across Ireland as landlords and merchants invested in the processing of grain for export. Corn mills of this era typically combined a millstone mechanism driven by a waterwheel with ancillary storage and dressing buildings, and the Mulrankin mill appears to follow that general pattern of incremental development, later fabric built around or onto earlier fabric.