The structure that appears on the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a three-bay, four-storey grist mill sitting roughly eighty metres north of a nearby moated site, may or may not occupy ground where milling was done centuries earlier. That question has never been resolved, and the gap between what the building looks like and what the land beneath it may once have held is part of what makes this corner of County Wexford quietly compelling.

The documentary trail for milling at Kilcowan reaches back at least to 1629, when an inquisition held in Wexford town on the 9th of October recorded that one Oliver Keating possessed a watermill and other property there. A grist mill, for those unfamiliar with the term, was a mill for grinding grain into flour or animal feed, typically powered by a waterwheel, and was a fixture of rural economic life across early modern Ireland. By the time of the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, which was a detailed land assessment carried out in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest, Oliver Keating's grandson, also named Oliver Keating, is recorded as owning not one but two watermills at Kilcowan in 1640. The family's hold on milling in this townland across at least two generations points to a place of some local agricultural significance, even if the physical evidence above ground dates from a later period entirely.