The survival of organic material in waterlogged conditions is always striking; wood that would otherwise have rotted away over decades can endure almost intact when kept wet and oxygen-deprived, which is precisely what happened here.

The pieces recovered include an oak flume, just under four metres in length, along with two structural beams and what may be a portion of an unfinished paddle. A flume, in a mill of this type, is the channel or trough that directed water onto the wheel, and the fact that one survives in such a measurable form gives a rare sense of the mill's actual scale. The wheel itself would have been horizontal rather than the more familiar vertical waterwheel; horizontal-wheeled mills, sometimes called Norse mills, were simpler in construction and very widespread in early medieval Ireland, where they were typically built over fast-moving streams. A timber sample from one of the structural beams was submitted for dendrochronological analysis, a technique that dates wood by matching the pattern of its annual growth rings against known reference sequences. M. Baillie of the Palaeoecology Laboratory at Queen's University Belfast produced a felling date of AD 1228, plus or minus nine years, placing the mill firmly in the thirteenth century, a period of considerable agricultural activity and settlement change across Wexford following the Anglo-Norman arrival in Ireland.