The Black Mill, as it was known, has long since vanished under tarmac and traffic markings, but its paper trail reaches back further than most people walking past would imagine.

The mill is first formally recorded in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, which places it near the Dominican Black Abbey on the Breagagh, a small river that still runs through the city. By the mid-eighteenth century, John Rocque's map of 1758 shows mills in the plural at this location, along with a large mill pond immediately to the north, and the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 to 1840 confirms the same arrangement. The site's origins, however, appear to stretch back at least to the thirteenth century. A charter from that period, cited by the historian Hogan in 1883, records the granting of St Canice's Well to the Dominican friars and permits them to build a conduit bringing the well water to their abbey. The charter includes a telling condition: the conduit had to be built in such a way that the water flowing to an existing mill would not be interrupted. Hogan identifies that mill as the Black Mill and argues that at this point it was under the control of the bishop rather than the friars next door, making the relationship between the abbey and the mill a more complicated one than the shared name might suggest. The Dominicans, who took their informal name from the dark stone of their friary, apparently had a neighbour with a prior claim on the watercourse.

Today the mill pond and mill buildings have been entirely absorbed into the urban fabric. The roundabout between Dominic Street, Butt's Green, the R695, and Water Barrack Street occupies the area where the pond once sat, and nothing visible remains of the structure that was significant enough to warrant protection in a thirteenth-century legal document.