A flour mill standing in level Kildare pasture, roughly 200 metres east of the River Liffey, carries within its fabric a much longer story than its post-medieval stonework immediately suggests. The mill sits on a mill-race, a channel cut to divert water and drive a wheel, and that race may be considerably older than the building itself. The same channel, or its course at least, appears to trace back to a monastic operation that was already well established when the Tudor commissioners arrived to wind it up.

The Augustinian priory at Greatconnell was founded in 1202 by Meyler Fitzhenry and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and St David. It survived for over three centuries before being suppressed on 24 November 1540. The dissolution inventory makes for surprisingly vivid reading: Robert Wesley, presumably the last prior, received a pension of over £13; five other canons received smaller sums; and the jurors recorded that all the buildings were still standing at the moment of closure. The church nave had served as the parish church from time immemorial, the chancel and the Lady Chapel could be demolished, but the belfry was considered worth converting into a small fortification to defend the surrounding area. Beyond the buildings, the priory's possessions included over 1,260 acres, five castles, a dovecote set into the town walls, numerous cottages, and a mill. The estate passed through several hands: granted first to Edward Randolfe, then in reversion to Sir Edward Butler, re-granted in 1560 to Sir Nicholas White, and again to Sir Edmond Butler in 1566. By the time of the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, two mills were recorded in the townland of Greatconnell, confirming that milling remained a going concern on the site well into the seventeenth century.

What makes the flour mill particularly interesting is the possibility that it was built directly on the footprint of the medieval monastic mill and that the mill-race it uses is the same one dug, or at least extended, by the Augustinian canons. That race is still visible running through the fields to the south and south-west of the old abbey graveyard, where the east gable of the priory's Lady Chapel was absorbed into the graveyard walls sometime after 1700. The landscape around Greatconnell is, in that sense, layered rather than lost: the channels, walls, and foundations of a 1202 foundation quietly persisting in the grass.