The building recorded on the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, labelled simply as an 'Old Flour Mill', may itself be standing on, or partly built from, the remains of a considerably earlier structure.

The evidence for that earlier presence comes from the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, the ambitious Cromwellian-era mapping project that aimed to document land ownership across Ireland following the wars of the mid-seventeenth century. On the barony map of Gowran for County Kilkenny, a watermill is marked on the western bank of the small tributary that runs southward roughly 60 metres before joining the River Nore. By the time the first Ordnance Survey maps were produced in the nineteenth century, a mill appears on the eastern bank of the same river. Whether that shift in bank reflects a rebuilding, a surveying discrepancy, or simply a change in the mill's footprint over time is not certain, but the continuity of milling on this little watercourse across at least two centuries is suggestive. The present three-storey structure may preserve within its fabric some material from whatever stood here before.