The presence of a mill here is not, in itself, surprising; the area around Jerpoint was extensively settled and managed during the medieval period, and mills were the industrial workhorses of that world, harnessing river flow to grind grain and drive other processes essential to monastic and manorial economies. What gives this particular site its interest is its setting, tucked into a locality that still carries the bones of a vanished medieval community.

Jerpointchurch takes its name from the Cistercian abbey of Jerpoint, founded in the twelfth century and one of the most significant monastic houses in Leinster. The abbey and its surroundings supported a functioning rural economy for centuries, and mills were a standard and valued part of that infrastructure. A monastic or manorial mill would typically have been built on a reliable watercourse, with a millrace, a weir or dam to control flow, and a millstone fed by a wooden hopper above. The broader Jerpoint area also contains the earthwork remains of the deserted medieval village of Newtown Jerpoint, which was once a functioning town with a church, market, and street plan visible as low ridges in the grass. The mill at Jerpointchurch fits into this same pattern of post-medieval decline and abandonment that left so much of the area fossilised rather than built over.