What makes the site unusual is the layering of those identities, each one recorded in a different kind of document, and the way the building itself carries physical traces of at least two distinct periods within the same walls.

The earliest record comes from the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, the ambitious Cromwellian mapping project that attempted to document landholding across Ireland in extraordinary detail. The parish map of Urlingford marks a watermill on the south bank of the Goul, annotated with the phrase "a mill in repaire", placing it immediately north of a castle and a thatched house. The accompanying terrier, the written land description that went with the map, names Lord Mountgarrett as the proprietor of Urlingford in 1640, described as an Irish Papist, the standard designation used in these surveys for Catholic landowners whose estates were subject to forfeiture. By the time the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1839, the site appears as "Four Mills", sitting in the same relative position north of the tower house and west of the river bridge. The function had shifted again by the 1900 revision, when the building was recorded as a creamery rather than a mill, a change that reflects the broader transformation of Irish rural industry in the late nineteenth century as cooperative dairying spread across the country. The existing stone structure is thought to be eighteenth or early nineteenth century in date overall, though the ground floor is considered earlier and may preserve fabric from the seventeenth-century mill documented in the Down Survey.