That the mill existed at all is largely down to the record-keeping impulse of mid-seventeenth-century surveyors, who were busy cataloguing Irish land ownership on behalf of the Cromwellian administration. Without them, this particular corner of north Dublin's industrial past might have vanished entirely without even a footnote.

The earliest reference appears in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a systematic assessment of landholding across Ireland, which notes a watermill operating on the lands of St. Mary's Abbey and the Grange of Clonliffe. St. Mary's Abbey was one of the most powerful Cistercian houses in medieval Ireland before its dissolution in the sixteenth century, and it controlled extensive agricultural lands on the north side of the city. Granges were outlying farms attached to a monastery, worked to supply the community with grain and other produce, and a watermill on such a grange would have been a practical necessity for grinding that grain. The Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, the ambitious mapping project overseen by William Petty, marks the site explicitly as 'Grange mill', giving it a place name that carries more weight than the sparse notation might suggest. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch maps in 1837, the mill was still being recorded, this time as a corn mill, meaning it had functioned in some form for the better part of two centuries after those first surveys.

Today, a printing works occupies the site, and there is no visible trace of any earlier structure. This is not unusual for urban mill sites, where successive phases of industrial use tend to erase rather than accumulate evidence. The location sits within Dublin's north inner city, an area that has been continuously developed and redeveloped since the Georgian period. A visitor hoping to find stonework, a millrace, or any physical remnant will come away empty-handed. The value of the site now lies almost entirely in the documentary record, in the overlap of the Civil Survey notation and the Down Survey cartography, which together fix a working mill to this precise location at a specific moment in time. For those interested in early mapping or monastic land use, tracking the relevant Down Survey maps through the digitised collections held by institutions such as the National Library of Ireland is likely to be more rewarding than any visit to the street itself.