But at Waterhouse on the Awbeg River in north Cork, those mounds, each roughly oval, around ten metres at their longest and rising only about a metre from the ground, are most likely the buried remains of a water mill. Concealed within at least one of them are stone-lined channels, their sides built of mortared random-rubble and their roofs formed from flat lintelled stones, extending inward for around thirteen feet. These are consistent with a mill race, the channel that directed water onto a wheel to drive the grinding machinery. The fact that two such mounds sit roughly four metres apart, on a bend in the river where the current would have been reliably strong, only reinforces the impression that this was once an active milling site.

The paper trail reaches back to the mid-seventeenth century. The Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, a vast mapping project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to record landholding across Ireland, shows a mill at this location on its barony map for the area. It is a brief notation, but a telling one, placing industrial activity here at a time when the wider landscape was being systematically documented for the purposes of plantation and land redistribution. What is particularly interesting is that the Down Survey also indicates a second mill on the opposite, southern bank of the Awbeg, just across the river. Two mills facing each other across the same watercourse suggests the Awbeg was valued as a reliable source of milling power, and that the bend at Waterhouse was a known and established working site rather than an incidental one.