The structure is modest enough that a passing walker might think nothing of it, but a sketch plan drawn up by a local researcher in 1942 places it at the centre of a careful argument about where, exactly, a medieval corn mill once stood.

Writing in 1942, a scholar named Lyons identified a spot roughly 140 metres south-west of the surviving mill pond as the probable location of an earlier mill, one he tentatively attributed to the Franciscans. His reasoning was practical: the water current at that point would have been sufficient to drive a wheel, and a ruined structure nearby seemed consistent with a mill building. A mill race, the channel cut to direct water from a source to the wheel, is visible on both the first edition Ordnance Survey maps of 1840 to 1841 and the mid-twentieth-century edition, suggesting the water management infrastructure was long established. Lyons also noted that the channel fed what he believed were medieval fish-ponds, and that no road ran through the area in medieval times, which he took as further evidence of an institutional, rather than commercial, setting. The Franciscans had a significant presence in Clonmel, and a monastic corn mill on the river margins would not have been unusual for the period. That said, the physical and documentary evidence stops short of confirming any pre-1700 activity at the precise location Lyons proposed, and his attribution remains speculative.