What makes this one stranger still is the strong local tradition that it never once ground a grain. The building was apparently constructed too close to an already-operating neighbour, Dannanstown Mills, which stood roughly 300 metres to the east, and so the new mill was simply left idle. Whether this reflects a miscalculation by whoever commissioned it, or a dispute over water rights along the Awbeg, is not recorded. The shell survives regardless: a rectangular structure measuring just over nine metres east to west and under six metres north to south, built of random-rubble limestone against a south-facing slope.

The design has a few features worth noting. On the south side, a wheel-pit roughly two and a half metres wide was built into the structure itself, with semicircular-arched openings cut through both the east and west walls to accommodate it. This kind of internal wheel arrangement is less common than an external waterwheel, and it gives the building a slightly unusual profile. A doorway set at second-floor level on the north elevation was almost certainly connected to higher ground behind by a wooden bridge, a practical solution given that the mill was built into a slope. The interior is now an empty shell, the broad low gables on the north and south walls still standing. The building does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which suggests it was constructed sometime after that date; by the 1905 edition it appears, though it is not named.

The mill sits on the north bank of the Awbeg, the same river that flows through Doneraile and which Edmund Spenser famously celebrated under the name Mulla. The proximity to Dannanstown Mills makes for an odd local pairing: one mill that worked, and one that apparently never did.