The building sits on a site that has been associated with milling for centuries, though the structure standing today appears to have no physical connection to the earlier mill it succeeded. That earlier mill, however, is the more interesting story.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the site clearly as a flour mill, complete with a mill pond to the east, the kind of small impounded water source that would have fed a wheel and kept the grinding stones turning. More striking is what the 1659 Down Survey records show for the same location. The Down Survey, the great mid-seventeenth-century mapping project that documented land ownership across Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, depicts a vertical-wheeled watermill here on its map of Ballymore parish and again on the map of Rathconrath barony. A vertical-wheeled watermill is the classic arrangement in which a wheel mounted upright on a horizontal axle is turned by the flow or fall of water, as opposed to the simpler horizontal mill type common elsewhere in early Irish milling. The Down Survey annotation reads simply "a mill", but its presence on two separate seventeenth-century maps suggests this was an established and recognised feature of the local landscape, not an incidental structure. The implication is that a medieval milling tradition at this spot persisted long enough to be inherited by the nineteenth-century flour mill, even if the physical fabric did not carry across.