It looks, at first glance, like a miniature tower house, with alternating quoins at the corners, a high base batter sloping outward at the base, and two splayed windows set into its southern wall. But the giveaway is the projection on the eastern wall, where a millrace channel, roughly 2.4 metres wide and 3 metres long, passes clean through the building from east to west. This is a working mill built by friars, and the water that once drove it ran beneath their own domestic buildings before reaching it.

The mill belongs to the domestic range of outbuildings associated with the Franciscan Friary at Adare, a monastic complex established in the fifteenth century and one of the more substantial religious houses in the region. The millrace, a channel cut to divert and direct flowing water to power the mill wheel, ran not only through the mill itself but also beneath a range of buildings at the northern end of the friary, including a garderobe, the medieval term for a latrine built into or projecting from a wall. The mill sits roughly 60 metres northwest of the friary nave and around 160 metres northeast of the River Maigue, whose water almost certainly fed the race. The monastic complex was surveyed by Harold Leask for the National Monuments Service, with the mill recorded in his 1960 publication, and the building appears on both the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition, shown each time as a compact square structure with external dimensions of 7.6 metres. Bradley and colleagues described the wider complex in the Urban Survey of County Limerick in 1989.

The mill now sits within the grounds of Adare Manor Golf Club, on what was formerly the demesne of Adare Manor. Access to the site is not straightforward for the casual visitor, given its location within the golf course estate. The building is obscured by mature trees, visible in aerial imagery but not easily spotted at ground level. Anyone with a particular interest in monastic archaeology or industrial history would do well to check with the golf club regarding access arrangements before visiting. If you do get close, look for the projecting east wall where the millrace once entered, and consider that water moved through this building continuously, grinding grain to feed a community of friars, for an unknown but likely considerable stretch of the medieval period.