When the Ordnance Survey recorded this complex at Ballymalis in 1846, they marked it plainly as a Paper Mill, and the ground plan they traced corresponds closely to the footprint that still exists today. Yet the site has long since shed that identity and now operates as the Kerry Woollen Mills, producing cloth rather than paper, and drawing on a river rather different from the industrial waterways more usually associated with papermaking in Ireland. That gap between label and lived reality is one of the quieter puzzles the place presents.

The mill sits roughly fifty metres east of the Gweestin river, its buildings arranged around a cobbled yard that has accumulated layers of purpose across two centuries. A mill pond to the north was built in 1835 and subsequently enlarged in the 1920s, giving some indication of how long and how actively the site has been worked. Two millstones propped against the northern range are thought to date from a period when the complex was operating as a flour mill, a function noted in Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of 1837, which means the site had already changed trade at least once before the 1846 map fixed it as a paper mill. The main three-storey building at the northern end is random rubble construction, its original hipped roof now replaced with corrugated iron; inside, a line shaft connected to a turbine still drives machinery, including fulling equipment, fulling being the process of cleansing and thickening woven cloth by beating or pressing it. The turbine sits in an enclosed wheel-pit at the north-west corner. Elsewhere in the yard, a washing machine manufactured by John Petrie of Rochdale occupies the ground floor of what was once a drying hall, and a corrugated iron structure houses a Crosley Diesel engine. Electricity now supplies the main power, though the turbine is still brought into use on occasion. The western range, brick and stone-built with dormer windows, once held a weaving room at ground level and a spinning mule on the upper floor; it has since been converted to a shop and storage space, and was at some point raised by two or three courses of brick. An early nineteenth-century single-storey office building extends from the south-west corner of the yard, and mid-twentieth-century sheds for weaving and storage stand to the south of the main complex.