Unlike the more familiar vertical waterwheel, a horizontal-wheeled mill, sometimes called a tide mill or Norse mill, uses a wheel laid flat beneath the millstone, driven directly by a jet of water channelled through a narrow flume. The design is one of the oldest milling technologies known in Ireland, and its remains are rarely found in such a legible state.

When the archaeologist C. Rynne examined the site in 1983, he identified what appeared to be the remnants of low dams nearby, suggesting the mill had once been served by a managed millpond. The configuration of the landscape seems to have done much of the engineering work: the steep slope of a river bluff alongside the site acted as a natural boundary for the pond, reducing the amount of artificial damming required. More striking still is what happened to the water supply itself. The feeder stream that once fed the mill was deliberately re-routed, its original course altered to direct flow where the miller needed it. That modified stream now drains into the Funshion rather than following whatever path it took before the mill was built, meaning the mill's builders left a mark on the local hydrology that has outlasted every timber and stone of the structure itself.