That detail, preserved in the 1341 Ormond Deeds, is one of the more unexpected footnotes attached to the watermill long associated with the manor of Lucan, a site that still appears, marked simply as the 'Old Mill', on John Taylor's 1816 map of County Dublin. Whether the structure Taylor recorded represents the original medieval mill or a later building from the sixteenth or seventeenth century has not been firmly established, but the documentary trail behind it stretches back considerably further than the map.

The earliest written reference to milling at Lucan comes from the Register of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist, which mentions the 'molendinum de Lyuekan', the mill of Lucan, in the early thirteenth century. By 1295 it was already valuable enough to be caught up in a legal dispute: Hugh de la Felde and his wife Alianora were removed from possession of their freehold, which included a share of the mill's profits. The 1341 court record, drawn up before several named Justices of the Bench during the reign of Edward III, settled a dispute between Simon fitz Richerd and John de Bath and his wife Eglentina over the manor and its mill at Lutterelstown, a detail that hints at where the manorial mill was actually situated. The Urban Survey of Dublin, compiled by Bradley and King in 1988, noted that although a watermill is frequently mentioned alongside the manor, including in the grant to Maurice, fourth earl of Kildare in 1386, the mill appears to have been located at Lutterelstown rather than in the village of Lucan itself. A watermill, in simple terms, used the flow of a river or stream to power millstones for grinding grain, and the River Liffey nearby would have provided a ready source of that power.

Taylor's 1816 map, which surveyed the environs of Dublin at a scale of two inches to one mile, shows the Old Mill in relation to the village of Lucan and the bridge crossing the Liffey, giving a reasonable sense of its position within the landscape. Anyone trying to locate the site today would do well to consult a copy of that map alongside current OS mapping, bearing in mind that the 'Old Mill' label may refer to remains that have since been absorbed into later development or reduced to very little. A survey of the lands of Lucan, held in the National Library of Ireland as part of the De Vesci Papers, offers an additional layer of documentary context for those wanting to trace the property history in closer detail.