That sequence of repurposing, spread across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, left behind one of the most architecturally layered industrial complexes in Munster, covering roughly eight acres and containing within it the bones of each successive use.

Marcus Lynch built the original structure in 1796 as a woollen mill, though the enterprise never took hold commercially. After a period as military barracks, the Murphy family acquired the site and established the distillery in 1825. The original five-storey mill building was not demolished but absorbed, its upper floors repurposed for storing barley and malt, its machinery adapted to grind grain. Power came from a cast iron breast-shot waterwheel, a type positioned so that water strikes the wheel roughly at mid-height, and the one here is substantial: 22 feet in diameter and 15 feet 3 inches wide, with the date 1852 cast directly into the iron. The wheel pit is still in situ, fed by a head race carried on a segmental arched aqueduct. From the wheel, power moved through spurwheel gearing to a main vertical millshaft and onward by bevel gears to the brewhouse, where the lineshaft was shared with two six-column independent beam engines; much of this gearing survives. One of the beam engines remains in place, while the other was removed to the Robert Guinness Museum. Elsewhere across the complex, a 3-storey structure attached to the fermentation house once housed pipes running down to the river for cooling, its archway keystone dated 1877. The second building complex, to the north-west, groups malt houses, kilns, a five-storey grain store, stone stable buildings, and, at the end of the southern range, an ornate two-storey Victorian brick office. The distillery continued working until 1975, when production moved to a modern facility built immediately to the north-east.

The old complex was restored and opened to the public in 1992 as the Jameson Heritage Centre. Visitors who look carefully beyond the interpretive dressing will find the waterwheel, the surviving gearing, the layered brickwork of different building phases, and the general outline of a site that was continuously adapted rather than ever quite finished.