That channel, the millrace, is the more durable of the two: a millrace is a purpose-built watercourse that diverts and accelerates river flow to drive a mill wheel, and this one, constructed from dressed limestone, points to origins somewhere in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The building it once served is gone, but the stonework of the race remains as a quiet record of an industry that shaped the rural economy of the Suir valley for generations.

The site may carry a longer history than its surviving masonry suggests. The Civil Survey, a detailed mid-seventeenth-century record of land and property compiled in the 1650s, notes the existence of two mills on the River Shewer in repaire at Beakstown, a reference published by Simington in 1931. The River Shewer is an older name for this stretch of water, and the phrase "in repaire" indicates the mills were functional and maintained at the time of the survey, suggesting milling activity here well before the limestone millrace was laid. Whether the surviving structure directly succeeds those earlier mills or represents a fresh establishment on a favoured site is not certain, but the continuity of the location along the same river bank makes the connection plausible.