The Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, marks a corn mill on this site, but the spot's working life almost certainly reaches back much further than that survey ever recorded.

In 1612, Robert Dillon of Cannorstown was granted a water-mill in Russagh, a detail preserved in the Calendar of Patent Rolls of Ireland for the reign of James I. A tuck mill, also sometimes called a fulling mill, was used to clean and thicken freshly woven cloth by beating it with heavy wooden hammers driven by a waterwheel, and the pairing of corn milling and tuck milling on a single watercourse was a common arrangement in early modern Ireland, where a landowner might harness the same stream for two quite different trades. The Dillon grant suggests the mill was already an established feature of the landscape by the early seventeenth century, and the possibility that the post-medieval structure recorded by the Ordnance Survey was itself built on the footprint of an earlier medieval mill pushes the site's history back further still, though no firm date for that earlier phase has been established.