That is roughly where the conventional story ends and the stranger one begins. Somewhere beneath a quietly sloping tillage field in Kilbarry, County Cork, there lies, or once lay, the subterranean remains of a horizontal-wheeled mill, a type of early Irish water mill in which the wheel lay flat beneath a timber housing, spun directly by a jet of water channelled through a narrow wooden chute, rather than turning vertically in the open air as later mills would do.

The discovery came down through the antiquarian writing of Grove White, who recorded it in his volumes published between 1905 and 1925. According to his account, a local man, prompted by a dream, began digging near what was probably an old rath, a circular earthen enclosure, a short distance to the east of the mill site. What he found instead of gold was a precisely built timber tank, twelve feet square and three feet deep, constructed from black oak planks each four inches thick, raised on four oak legs two feet high. A wooden chute, one foot wide at the mouth, ran into it, apparently designed to direct the flow of water that would have powered the mill above. The survival of such detail in oak is unusual; the timber had presumably been preserved by waterlogged conditions in the soil. The site sits just north of a stream valley that was dry at the time of a more recent visit, which may explain why the hydrology that once made the mill viable is no longer obvious on the ground.

The field had also been marked on the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as the site of a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking place typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone near a water source, and was noted as such by Bowman in 1934. No such material was found when the site was examined more closely. Today there is no visible trace of anything at the surface, and the mill's oak tank, if it remains at all, lies unexcavated beneath the slope.