A site in County Kildare carries two distinct names across three centuries of maps, and the gap between those names conceals a small, telling story about industry, ownership, and ruin. On Taylor's 1783 Map of County Kildare the location appears as 'Terrils Ca. and Mills', a name that points back to an older Tyrrell association with the land. By the time the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map was revised in 1938, the same spot was recorded as Temple Mills, the earlier identity largely forgotten.

The most detailed glimpse of the place comes not from a map but from the Civil Survey of 1654, a wide-ranging Cromwellian-era land assessment compiled to establish ownership and value across Ireland in the aftermath of war and plantation. The entry is concise and quietly revealing. A woman named Mrs. Mabel Aylmer, described as an Irish Papist, held Tyrrells Mill along with two acres of land, the whole valued at £16 a year for letting purposes. That designation, Irish Papist, was not merely descriptive; it marked her as belonging to a class of landowners whose property was under active threat of confiscation during the Cromwellian settlement. What makes the entry stranger still is the condition of the property itself. Two mills stood on the premises, a corn mill and a cloth mill, and both were, in the survey's words, ruined and waste. The site was already derelict at the moment it was being formally recorded, its value assessed not on what it was producing but on what it theoretically might be worth if restored.