It appears on an older six-inch Ordnance Survey map, yet when surveyors visited the site, there was nothing to see on the surface, no stonework, no millrace, no obvious earthwork. The only physical clue was a scattering of old timber beams lying in a field beside a drain running roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, a drain that does not even appear on more recent OS editions. It is a site defined almost entirely by absence.

Horizontal-wheeled watermills, sometimes called tide mills or click mills in Irish and Scottish contexts, represent one of the earliest milling technologies used in Ireland. Unlike the familiar vertical waterwheel, a horizontal mill uses a wheel laid flat beneath the millstone, driven directly by a jet of water channelled through a narrow wooden or stone trough. They were common in early medieval Ireland, and many were modest, timber-built structures that left little trace once they fell out of use. The Newtown example fits this pattern uncomfortably well. The working theory is that the timber beams may have been disturbed and brought to the surface when the drain was being cleared, which would suggest the mill's remains had been preserved in waterlogged conditions beneath the field. How long they had been there, and who built or operated the mill, is entirely unknown. There is no paper file associated with the site, and it is unclear what the original source of information about the mill even was, which means its presence on the older map may itself be a puzzle without a clear answer.