The building measures roughly six metres in length and stands four metres high, with walls over a metre thick, substantial enough to suggest serious industrial purpose. The east wall, which once faced directly onto the river, has collapsed into the stream below. What remains, principally the south wall and fragments of the west, leans at angles that make approach inadvisable. A large opening at the base of the south face, three metres wide and a metre high, hints at the kind of water-management features common to old mill structures, and the south wall also shows base-batter, a deliberate outward sloping of the wall at its foot used to add structural stability and resist the lateral pressure of water or earth. A possible window opening survives at the south-west angle, with traces of brick suggesting the building was adapted or repaired at some point after its original construction.

The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map already marks this as a mill in ruins, meaning the structure was recognisably derelict by the mid-nineteenth century at the latest. Its origins, however, may reach back considerably further. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land inquisition carried out following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, records the lands of Lickfinn as belonging to James, Earl of Ormond, and notes the seat of a mill on the property. Whether this ruin is the direct physical descendant of that recorded mill cannot be stated with certainty, but the location, the building materials, and the presence of what appears to be a silted mill pond to the north-east all make the connection plausible. That pond area, now a waterlogged depression, was filled in during land reclamation work in the early 1900s, quietly erasing one of the more legible pieces of the site's original hydraulic machinery.