Water mills, which harnessed the flow of a stream or diverted channel to turn a horizontal or vertical wheel, were central to agricultural life in Ireland from at least the early medieval period, and their ruins, often little more than a scatter of dressed stone or a silted millrace, persist in townlands where the original watercourse may still be traced.

Lios Uachtair, whose Irish name suggests an enclosure or fort in an upper or elevated position, sits within a county whose landscape is shot through with evidence of long habitation, from ring forts and field systems to the remnants of small-scale industrial works like this mill. Water mills became especially widespread from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as landlord-driven agriculture expanded the demand for milled grain, and many were built or rebuilt during that period on sites where milling had already taken place for generations. The specific history of this particular mill, its builders, the date of its construction, and the stream that once drove it, remain to be fully documented.