What makes the site quietly unusual is the layering: a bleach mill complex still substantially standing, the ghost of a flour and corn mill reduced largely to its stonework, and a history that stretches back far enough to appear on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, where a mill is marked beside a river fall, directly across the water from a church.

The Down Survey, commissioned under the Cromwellian administration to map forfeited Irish lands, gives the site its earliest documentary appearance, suggesting milling activity here long before the industrial expansion of the late eighteenth century. The next legible chapter belongs to a Mr Jackson, who according to local historian McGarry built a mill on the site in 1797. The property later passed to Alexander Sim, who added a flour and corn mill on the opposite, eastern bank of the river. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1838, two mills faced each other across the Owenmore, with a third positioned roughly 200 metres to the north, set back from the water in the area known as Bleachgreen. A bleachgreen, in the context of the linen industry, was an open ground where woven cloth was laid out and wetted repeatedly to whiten in the sun, and the presence of a bleach mill here points to Sligo's involvement in that trade during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The flour and corn mill that Sim built has been largely demolished, but the stonework of its wheel-pits and the arched channels of its head and tailraces, the passages that directed water onto and away from the wheel, remain visible on the ground. The bleach mill complex on the western bank is the more intact of the structures, and it is this side of the river that rewards closer attention for anyone interested in what industrial riverside architecture looked like before most of it disappeared.