Along the River Funshion in north Cork, near the townland of Manning, a water mill was recorded on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, that remarkable seventeenth-century cartographic project commissioned under Cromwellian administration to document Irish landholdings in granular detail. On that map, the mill sits on the northern bank of the river, close to what is identified as Manning House.

The story gets more complicated when the local historian James Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, described something quite different on the opposite bank. On the southern side of the Funshion, just below Manor House, he noted the remains of a very long weir and an old mill race, the channel cut to direct water and drive a mill wheel, which local tradition apparently called the Manor Mill. A mill race of notable length suggests a substantial operation, one that would have served the surrounding estate and community. Whether Grove White was describing a separate mill entirely, or whether the Down Survey had simply placed the same feature on the wrong bank, is impossible to say with certainty. What is clear is that by the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area in 1842, no mill features at all were recorded in this locality. The physical remains Grove White described had not yet been mapped, or had already fallen so far into disrepair as to escape the surveyors' notice, or both.