The development, called the Cornmill, takes its name from what came before it, a 19th-century mill complex that itself was built on ground where a mill had already stood for centuries. The name is about all that remains visible.

The site appears on the Down Survey map of 1655 to 1656, a remarkable mid-17th-century cartographic project that recorded land ownership across Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, intended largely to facilitate the redistribution of forfeited estates. A companion document, the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, names the proprietor of the mill at that time as Peter Barnewall, a member of one of the old Anglo-Norman families long established in the Fingal area of north County Dublin. The Barnewalls were a significant landowning dynasty in this part of Leinster, and their connection to a working mill here reflects the economic importance of such sites in the period. Milling rights and mill structures were valuable assets, often passed down or contested alongside land itself. The 19th-century complex that eventually replaced or rebuilt on the earlier mill continued that working tradition before the site was eventually redeveloped into housing.

There is nothing to see of the mill itself today. The Cornmill apartment complex stands on the site, and no physical fabric of the original structure appears to have survived the redevelopment. For anyone curious about the location, it sits within Balbriggan town, which is accessible by rail on the Dublin to Belfast commuter line. The interest here is less in what can be observed and more in the layering that the documentary record reveals, a 19th-century mill built where a 17th-century mill already stood, the whole sequence now compressed beneath contemporary housing. The name of the development, perhaps chosen without much thought for its resonance, ends up being the sole legible trace of several hundred years of milling on the same ground.