Where a reliable water source could be channelled into a millrace, communities built and depended upon these structures for grinding grain into flour or meal, and their remains, whether ruined walls, a millstone left in a field, or the faint earthworks of a diverted stream, tend to outlast almost everything else around them.

Beyond its classification as a recorded monument, the specific history of the Springfield mill, its construction date, the families who operated it, and the period during which it was active, remains to be fully documented in the public record. What can be said is that corn mills of this type were working features of Irish agricultural life from the medieval period onwards, with many reaching their peak of activity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when tillage was widespread across Connacht. The decline of small-scale milling came gradually, hastened by the consolidation of larger commercial mills and, in the west of Ireland, by the broader agricultural and demographic upheavals of the nineteenth century.