That is rather the point. What survives here is a location, a designation on heritage records, and a gap in the landscape where a working mill once turned in the wind above the town.

The earliest documentary evidence for a windmill at this spot appears in the Corporation Book of Ennis, which records its existence in 1807. Windmills of this period in Ireland were typically tower mills, stone-built structures that used the elevation of their surroundings to catch prevailing winds and grind grain for local communities. The raised ground at Lifford would have made it a practical choice for such a structure, lifting the sails clear of any obstruction. By 1855, however, the windmill was gone. Records from the General Valuation Office, the mid-nineteenth-century survey of Irish property conducted under Richard Griffith, note its demolition, meaning the structure had disappeared sometime in the roughly fifty years between those two dates. What caused its removal is not recorded; mills of this kind were sometimes dismantled when steam-powered milling made them redundant, or simply when the cost of upkeep outweighed their usefulness.