The name alone suggests the structure had already been a ruin for some time by then, reduced to a label for a place that people evidently still remembered, even if what they remembered had largely disappeared. The surviving wall footings are modest, with walls roughly 0.8 metres thick, and a separate two-storey windmill shell from the nineteenth century stands about three metres to the south-southwest, adding a second layer of industrial ruin to the same small hilltop.

What gives the site its peculiar weight is the event that may have taken place here in May 1642, during the turbulent early months of the Irish Rebellion that had broken out the previous October. According to Mary Hickson's 1884 compilation of depositions and historical records, Sir Silvester Browne was seized from his house in Formoyle by several Irishmen and brought to a windmill, where he was hanged alongside a man named Daniel Stubbs. If the identification is correct, this unremarkable cluster of stones on an exposed Longford hill was the scene of one of the countless violent episodes that punctuated the rebellion's early phase, when landlords, settlers, and their tenants found themselves caught in rapid and often lethal reversals of power. The conditional matters: the notes are careful to say this "may be" the site, and Hickson's volumes, though valuable, are working from seventeenth-century depositions that carry their own complications.

The hilltop position, overlooking Lough Ree to the south and southwest, would have made the windmill a practical choice for its original purpose, catching wind off the lake. That same exposed elevation means the two ruins, the old stump and the later shell, remain visible landmarks in an otherwise quiet part of Longford, carrying a history that the landscape offers no obvious sign of.