The complex at Archersgrove is now abandoned and in poor condition, but its stonework and the millrace that still runs along its southern edge give a sense of what was once a busy, multi-purpose industrial site.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the Archers were well established as the dominant landholders in this stretch of the Nore valley, and the mills here were the centrepiece of their holdings. A survey document from 1654 to 1656 describes three separate mill buildings belonging to Thomas Archer, identified in an accompanying terrier as an Irish Papist proprietor in 1640, a designation that carried significant legal and political weight in the years just before Cromwellian confiscations reshaped landownership across Ireland. Two of the buildings housed corn mills, their walls of stone with roofs partly of slate and partly of thatch; a third contained a tuck mill, a type of fulling mill used to clean and thicken woven cloth, though even by the time of the survey it was already described as ruinous. The Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656, the large-scale cartographic project commissioned to document Irish landholding after the Cromwellian settlement, show a water mill on this site within the townland then known as Archersgrove and the Broadfields. A second Archer coat of arms survives at Lacken mill, roughly 1.2 kilometres to the north-west, suggesting the family controlled a string of milling operations along the river rather than a single isolated enterprise.