That detail alone sets this small complex apart: not a ruin stripped of its machinery, but a place where the working parts of an earlier industrial life remain more or less where they were left.

By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey recorded the site on its six-inch maps, the complex was already operating as both a flour and carding mill, with a separate tuck mill some thirty metres to the north-west. Each served a distinct purpose in the rural economy. The flour mill processed grain; the carding mill would have combed raw wool fibres in preparation for spinning; and the tuck mill, also called a fulling mill, finished woven cloth by beating and cleansing it to thicken the weave. All three functions within a short distance of one another, drawing on the same stream, point to a community that was making serious use of water power. The flour mill itself is a gable-ended, three-bay structure, three storeys tall, built to a rectangular plan of roughly five and a half by six and a half metres internally. Its main mechanical element is a wooden clasp arm pit wheel, nearly two metres in radius, fitted with iron cogs, which drove a line shaft running along the western wall and transmitted power up to the millstones on the first floor. A pit wheel of this kind sits in a chamber, or pit, beneath floor level, driven by water channelled to it from the stream; here that wheel-pit runs along the northern wall and is no longer visible from the interior. Stone-built additions to the south-east and west of the main mill may have accommodated the carding operation. The tuck mill to the north-west is a lower, two-storey building, built into the western slope of the valley, with its own wheel-pit at the northern end of the western wall.