The site sits roughly a hundred metres north-east of a motte, the earthen mound raised by Anglo-Norman lords as the foundation for a timber castle, and scholars have argued that the continuity of milling here is no coincidence. A royal grant of 1346 transferring the Barony and Lordship of Kenlis from Eustace le Poer to Lord Walter de Bermingham explicitly includes a water mill within the manor of Kells, and the location fits closely enough that the present mill is almost certainly the direct descendant of that medieval predecessor.

The most vivid evidence for that continuity comes from a late eighteenth-century sketch by Vallancy, later copied by Beranger, which shows a building on what appears to be the same spot. At that point it was a modest single-storey thatched structure, drawn from the west, with a large off-centre door, a small window at eaves level near the mill-wheel end to the south, and a second window at the opposite end, partly hidden by rising ground. By the time the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map was published in 1839, a flour mill was recorded here, and a 1948 revision of the same map annotates the building as a corn mill. The structure standing today, a four-bay limestone rubble building with a slated roof and a mill-wheel on the south gable, is that same building shown on the OS maps. Across the mill race to the south sits the miller's house, a two-storey two-bay limestone rubble building with a matching slated roof, completing a small industrial composition that has barely shifted in its essentials across several centuries.