Local tradition has always called it a windmill, and that name has stuck, even as the remains themselves have become increasingly difficult to read beneath encroaching vegetation.

Windmills were never common in Ireland, and the ones that did exist were typically tower mills, with a cylindrical stone base designed to support a rotating cap and sails above. A structure of four metres in diameter would be modest even by those standards, which leaves some ambiguity about what exactly was built here and when. The circular form is consistent with a mill base, but without more surviving fabric it is difficult to say whether the building was ever completed, whether it fell out of use early, or whether the local name preserves a genuine memory of its function. What remains is essentially a low ring of stone, its original purpose carried forward only in the word people have always used for it.