The site is unassuming to look at, easily missed, and yet what was found beneath the ground here pushed back the known history of medieval milling technology in the country by a considerable margin.

The site came to light in 1959 when the landowner noticed something unusual and subsequently brought it to the attention of Michael Walsh of University College Cork, who excavated it and published his findings in 1965. Walsh uncovered the remains of a stone-built mill house and a wheelrace, the channel through which water was directed onto the wheel, designed for a vertical breastshot waterwheel. A breastshot wheel is one where water strikes the wheel roughly at its midpoint, halfway up, rather than from above or below, giving it a mechanical efficiency suited to sites with a moderate but reliable water flow. Among the finds were ten pivot stones, which would have formed the lower bearing on which a pinion gear rotated, along with eight gear pegs or teeth and a small fragment of the waterwheel's shroud, the outer casing that helped contain the water's force. Just to the north, Walsh identified a roughly triangular depression of around 940 square metres as the remains of a mill-pond, fed by a V-shaped channel drawing water from another stream some 800 metres away. Two millstone fragments confirmed that the mill processed grain. The scholar Colin Rynne, writing in 1998, dated the site to the high-medieval period, broadly the twelfth or thirteenth century, and identified it as the earliest known breastshot mill in Ireland, drawing comparisons with iron-working mills of the same type in England. The possible connection to industry is strengthened by evidence of iron-working found a short distance upstream, and Walsh also identified the remains of a second mill roughly 200 metres downstream.

The site sits in level pasture on the southern bank of a stream that runs west to east. Access to working farmland in Ireland generally requires permission from the landowner, and nothing here announces itself as a monument in any formal sense. Those with a specific interest in medieval industrial archaeology will find the outlines of the mill-pond depression the most legible feature on the ground; the mechanical components recovered during excavation are no longer in situ. The surrounding landscape, flat and quietly agricultural, gives little hint of how sophisticated the engineering here once was.