That ambiguity is rather the point. The site is recorded on the basis of a theory, a stagnant ditch, and a millstone that nobody has been able to find for at least a century, possibly longer. It is, in other words, a place defined almost entirely by what is absent.

The case for a mill here rests largely on the work of Hubert Thomas Knox, a Mayo antiquarian who wrote about the area in 1908 and again in 1911. Knox was drawn to a nearby rath, the ringfort known as Lisanaffrin, a roughly circular earthwork of the kind commonly built as a defended farmstead in early medieval Ireland. Noting the presence of what he took to be an ancient millstream running alongside the rath's ditch, and a small millstone lying in the river close by, he speculated that the enclosure had been occupied by millers and others whose work required an abundance of water. It was a reasonable inference. Mills in early Ireland were typically built near running water, often in association with settled agricultural communities, and a rath would have provided both shelter and storage. Knox returned to the idea in a later paper, describing the millstone with slightly more confidence, as though repetition had firmed up the evidence. But when the site was inspected in 1998, the millstone could not be found, and there was nothing at ground level to confirm that a mill had ever stood there. The watercourse Knox identified as a millstream is now thought to be a stagnant field ditch to the west-northwest of the rath, with a larger drainage channel a few metres to the east marking the townland boundary. Neither looks much like a working mill race.

What remains is a low, wet field, a possible ditch, a vanished stone, and the memory of a theory. The forestry plantation that now covers the adjacent land to the east has altered the character of the area further, leaving the site marooned in a landscape that has quietly moved on around it.