The structure belongs to a category of building that was once fundamental to rural Irish life. Waterpowered flour mills were the processing centres of agricultural communities, converting locally grown grain into the meal and flour that fed families and sustained local economies. Their remains, whether ruined walls, millraces, or the ghost of a millpond, are scattered across the Irish countryside in considerable numbers, and Pollboy's example is one of them.

The milling of grain in Ireland has roots stretching back well over a thousand years, with horizontal mills appearing in the early medieval period and vertical wheel mills becoming more common from the post-medieval era onwards. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, flour milling had become a more industrialised concern in many parts of Connacht, with local landlords and merchants investing in larger stone-built structures capable of serving wider districts. The exact history of the Pollboy mill, including when it was built, who operated it, and how long it remained in use, is not currently documented in accessible sources, which leaves the structure in an interesting kind of limbo, recorded and protected, but not yet publicly described in any detail.