The site appears in early seventeenth-century documents with enough specificity to be tantalising, yet its precise location has never been pinned down, leaving a small gap in the landscape that the historical record cannot quite fill.

The paper trail begins in 1612, when Robert Dillon of Cannorstown was granted a watermill in Carrick as part of a parcel that also included twelve houses, a castle, and one ploughland, a standard unit of land measurement from the period. By 1621, the picture had become more complicated. Dillon surrendered his Carrick holdings to the Crown, and the grant recorded not one but two watermills on the land. That same year, the castle and lands of Carrick, watermills included, passed to Sir William Parsons. Whether one of those mills was a tuck mill, used for fulling woven cloth by pounding it in water rather than grinding grain, is not made explicit in the surviving records, though the pairing of corn mill and tuck mill at a single site was common enough in early modern Ireland. What the Ordnance Survey six-inch map later labelled "Carrick Mill" may represent a continuation of that medieval and early modern milling tradition on the same spot, though the connection remains a possibility rather than a certainty.