The mill retains its wooden floors and some of its late-nineteenth-century machinery, and the broader complex, which once sprawled across five or six blocks of buildings, an engine house, immense storage sheds, and a loft chimney, grew so organically over the decades that its southern range follows a Z-plan, with a two-storey country house, Quartertown Lodge, appended to the east side almost as an afterthought.

The site owes its existence to an act of deliberate hydraulic engineering. In 1826, John Dillon Croker diverted an ancient water-course that had been feeding the Manor Mill to the north, redirecting it to supply new mills on the Quartertown lands; the millrace runs from the Clyda River roughly a kilometre and a half to the south. By 1851, when Griffith's Valuation was compiled, Croker was leasing the mills to a Joseph McMullen. Within two years, Robert and John Webb had taken over and modernised the operation, bringing in roller mills manufactured by Messrs. E.R.F. Turner of London. Then in 1854, Perrotts of Cork fitted a twenty-foot-high, twelve-foot-wide iron waterwheel along with new millstones and gearing. A railway siding connecting the complex to the Great Southern and Western Railway was completed in 1864, the same year the mills burnt down and had to be rebuilt, with new machinery supplied by Murphy of Wexford. The site changed character more than once after that: a woollen factory operated within the complex for a period, was replaced by an Indian Meal Mill, and saw mills were added in 1878. The whole enterprise eventually became part of the Cork Milling Company in the 1930s before ceasing to function as a mill altogether in 1957. What had begun as a flour mill, named as such on the 1842 Ordnance Survey map, ended its working life as something considerably more difficult to categorise. Some of the buildings are now used as industrial units.