Nothing of it survives above ground today, yet its story can be traced across two quite different maps, centuries apart, each catching the same stretch of river at a different moment in time.

The older of the two appearances comes from the Down Survey, the ambitious mid-seventeenth-century cartographic project that mapped landholding across Ireland in the years following the Cromwellian wars. On its parish map of Freshford, dated to 1655 or 1656, a watermill is marked on the Nuenna River, roughly 500 metres north-west of Freshford church. Almost two centuries later, the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1839, shows the Cascade flour mills in what appears to be the same general location, situated on the north side of a mill race, a channel cut to direct water onto the mill wheel, that ran north-west to south-east to the south of the main river. Whether the seventeenth-century mill and the Cascade mills were built on precisely the same spot, or merely in close proximity to one another, cannot be confirmed, but the correspondence is close enough to suggest an unbroken tradition of milling at this point on the river across at least two hundred years. The Cascade mills were subsequently demolished, and the site has left no obvious trace on the present landscape.