It is not visible at ground level, which makes it an unusual entry in any record of Irish industrial heritage: a structure that can be traced across centuries of cartography yet has effectively vanished into the ground beneath schoolchildren's feet.

The windmill's documentary history is surprisingly long. It appears on a 1772 map by Valency, a military surveyor who was working in Ireland during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and that map is thought to draw on an earlier Down Survey map from 1655 to 1656, the great Cromwellian land-mapping exercise that recorded Ireland's territory for the purposes of plantation and redistribution. The Down Survey original in question is now missing, which makes Valency's map its indirect echo. By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey published its six-inch map series, the windmill is recorded as still working, a functioning piece of local milling infrastructure in the parish of St. Michael of Feagh. By the time the twenty-five-inch OS map was produced later in the nineteenth century, it had become a ruin. Somewhere between those two surveys, the sails stopped turning.