Yet this particular scatter of stone, roughly eight metres by six and barely a metre high, is what remains of a tall circular windmill tower that was standing well into living memory, demolished around 1995. A second windmill of similar construction once stood about 250 metres to the north-northwest, and that too came down around the same time, leaving the ridge without the pair of towers that had punctuated its skyline for centuries.

The site has a longer history than the relatively recent demolitions suggest. The Civil Survey of Limerick, carried out between 1654 and 1656, records that Lieutenant Colonel William Piggott was then the owner of Kilfinny, a holding that contained a castle, an orchard, and a mill seat. The survey entry, published by Simington in 1938, indicates that milling had been established here before the disruptions of the Confederate Wars. Those wars are precisely what gave the windmill an unlikely moment in the military record. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1906 to 1907, drew on seventeenth-century depositions and the History of the Irish Confederates to describe events in January 1642, when Confederate forces under Edy Lacy of Bruree besieged Kilfinny Castle and were driven back by ten musketeers positioned on the windmill. General Purcell subsequently took the mill and barns, was driven out again, and the buildings were burned during a sortie on the eighth and ninth of that month. The castle itself held out with considerable tenacity; the besiegers tried using "sows", which were mobile wooden shelters used to approach fortifications under fire, but these were pierced and abandoned. The garrison's commander, referred to as Lady Dowdall, managed to relieve Croom no fewer than five times from this position before the fall of Limerick Castle gave the Confederates access to heavy artillery. Three shots from those guns were sufficient; Lady Dowdall surrendered and was conducted safely away by Lord Inchiquin. By 1655, the castle, orchard, and mill seat were recorded as being held by Gerott FitzGarrold.

The site lies at the southern end of the limestone ridge at Kilfinny in County Limerick. What a visitor finds today is unprepossessing, the rubble mound giving little sense of the tower's original height or form. The second mill site to the north-northwest is similarly reduced. There is no formal access or interpretation on the ground, and the value of the visit is largely one of orientation, standing on the ridge and considering what a commanding position these towers once occupied, visible across the surrounding farmland and, in January 1642, useful enough to a small group of defenders to change the course of a siege.