What makes the site quietly compelling is the layering of its documentary record: by the time anyone thought to survey it in the modern era, it had already been old for generations.

The earliest firm evidence for a mill at this location appears on the Down Survey map of 1655 to 1658, a remarkable cartographic project directed by William Petty that systematically recorded land ownership across Ireland in the wake of the Cromwellian settlement. A mill is clearly marked there, which means the site was already in working use in the mid-seventeenth century at the latest. By the time the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1840, the place had acquired the label "Old Flour Mill", a designation that implies the building or its function was already regarded as a relic by the surveyors who recorded it. The present structure, though it dates to the 1700s or 1800s, may therefore be a rebuild or replacement on earlier foundations, the river having drawn millers to the same spot across successive centuries.