The building sits into a north-west-facing slope above the Lee Valley Reservoir, and the slope rises so steeply along the south-west wall that what was designed as a first-floor door opens directly onto the hillside. It is an architectural oddity that makes immediate sense once you are standing there, but reads strangely on paper.

The structure appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, marked simply as a mill, which puts its existence beyond that date but leaves the question of its construction open. It is a two-storey rectangular building, measuring roughly eight metres along its north-west to south-east axis and just over five metres across, with low ivy-clad gables that have settled into the landscape rather than asserting themselves above it. The mechanical evidence is still legible in the stonework: along the north-east wall runs a wheel-pit, not quite three-quarters of a metre wide, with a low tail-race arch, the channel through which water exited after driving the wheel. A second corn mill stands a short distance to the south-west, suggesting that this stretch of the valley was once a more active milling area than its current quietness implies. The reservoir that now fills the Lee Valley below was not part of the original landscape the mill would have known.