What gives the structure its particular quiet strangeness is a detail lodged in the masonry itself: some of the dressed quoins at the south-west corner, the carefully shaped stones used to strengthen the corners of a building, turn out to be reused fragments of quern-stones, the hand-operated grinding stones used to mill grain. Their presence suggests that an earlier grain mill once stood on or very near this spot, and that when the present building went up, the old stones were simply broken and built in.

The rectangular two-storey structure, five bays wide along its south-east-facing front and built of random rubble with dressed quoins, appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1846 and 1895, by which point it was operating as a fulling mill. Fulling is the process of cleansing and thickening woven cloth, traditionally done by beating wet fabric, and mills set up for the purpose were typically sited beside fast-running water. Here, a mill race fed from the north drove the wheel, which sat in a pit at the north-east end of the building, details recalled by a former occupant and confirmed by the 1846 map. The mill eventually shifted to wool processing more broadly and continued as a woollen mill until it closed in the 1970s. It was then restored and converted to private residential use, a fate that saved the main structure but softened its industrial character. The windows and door have been modernised, though some original brick remains visible in the window surrounds at the rear. A second two-storey wing, added at right angles to the south-west of the original and absent from the 1846 map, is joined to the older building by a modern glass-walled extension, leaving the site as a layered composite of different periods and purposes.