By 1934, when Gogarty wrote his poem "The Mill at Naul", the old flour mill on the River Delvin near the village of Naul in north County Dublin had already been silent for decades, its roof gone, its working life finished somewhere in the window between 1869 and 1906. That a building could inspire verse even in ruin says something about the weight milling sites carried in the Irish countryside, where the combination of a reliable river and a good millstone could define the economic life of an entire townland.

The story of milling at this spot on the Delvin reaches back well before Gogarty's elegy. The Civil Survey of Dublin, compiled between 1654 and 1656 and drawing on conditions as they stood in 1641, recorded the lands of Peter Hussie of Westowne as carrying a corn mill and a tuck mill, the latter being a fulling mill used to clean and thicken woven cloth. Both were noted as in use and valued together at fifteen pounds. The Down Survey, the great seventeenth-century mapping project overseen by William Petty, also recorded a mill in the townland, noting it stood on the River Elfin, the older name for the Delvin, alongside a bridge. The precise location has some ambiguity; the Down Survey map places a watermill to the east of Naul Bridge in an area that today falls near Naul Park House, though the accompanying written terrier suggests the mill may instead have stood on the south bank of the river within County Dublin. Either way, by the early eighteenth century the earlier structure had been replaced entirely. Arthur Mervyn erected a new flour mill on the site between 1718 and 1722, and it is this building whose later dereliction caught Gogarty's eye.

The site lies along the Delvin River near the village of Naul, which sits in the Barony of Balrothery in the far north of County Dublin, close to the Meath border. The mill underwent renovation in the early 2000s, preceded by an archaeological assessment carried out under licence in 2004; no significant finds or buried features came to light during that work. Visitors to the area who take an interest in early cartography might find it rewarding to compare Rocque's 1760 map of County Dublin, held digitally by Trinity College Dublin, with the Down Survey parish maps held at the National Library of Ireland, both of which show the Naul settlement and the river crossing. The landscape around the Delvin retains a quiet, slightly out-of-the-way quality that makes the layering of these historical records feel particularly vivid on the ground.