What makes the site quietly puzzling is that both were built as fulling mills, known in Ireland also as tuck mills, where woven woollen cloth was hammered and compressed in water to thicken and felt the fibres, yet one of them apparently ended its working life grinding corn. A runner millstone, the upper of the two circular stones in a grinding pair, now lies abandoned in the dried-out millrace channel, a small but telling sign that industrial buildings in rural Ireland rarely stayed fixed to a single purpose.

The more substantial of the two structures is a two-storey rectangular building of random-rubble limestone construction, measuring just over ten and a half metres along its long axis. Its millrace channel, now dry, once carried water through the centre of the building beneath arched openings in two of its walls, and the north-west elevation still carries two first-floor windows and a chimney above the gable. The second mill, about forty metres to the south, is considerably more fragmentary; only the outline of two walls survives, with part of the south-east gable formed naturally by a rock face. The tail-race arch, the opening through which water exited after passing the mill wheel, is still visible in the north-east wall, and a pond immediately to the south-west is likely the original mill pond. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the millrace being drawn from the river roughly four hundred metres to the west, where it then divided to supply both mills simultaneously. A third fulling mill stands about six hundred and fifty metres further west, suggesting this stretch of the Awbeg once supported a modest concentration of cloth-working industry, all of it now reduced to fragmentary walls and a displaced millstone.