The southern elevation has collapsed entirely, opening the interior to the sky, and the half-hipped roof, the kind in which the upper portion of the gable is cut back at a slope rather than rising to a full point, is gone. What remains is the L-shaped bulk of the building itself, sitting more or less as it appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842.

The mill was erected in 1832 as a flour mill, and it sat immediately to the north-west of a starch mill that has since vanished without trace. Starch milling was a distinct industrial process, separate from flour production, and the two operations occupying adjacent plots suggests a degree of local industrial density that can be easy to underestimate in a rural Cork village. In the late 1870s the flour mill was absorbed into a distillery and repurposed as a corn store, which would have involved significant internal reorganisation. The distillery itself did not last long; it closed before the end of the 1880s and its fittings were scrapped, a detail reported in the Kinsale Newsletter in 1989. Along the eastern elevation, a wheel-pit cut directly into the bedrock survives, roughly four metres wide, which would once have housed the waterwheel driving the mill machinery. Rock-cutting of that scale required considerable effort and points to a serious investment in permanent infrastructure, even at a site that would change hands and purposes within a few decades of its construction.