The larger of the two mills is a roofless three-storey structure, and inside its wheel-pit the wooden axle of a breastshot waterwheel, a type fed by water striking the wheel partway up rather than from above or below, still sits in place. The axle is 3.1 metres long and 43.5 centimetres in diameter, retaining its cast-iron gudgeon and eight iron sockets that once held wooden arms; a single arm survives. Traces of the wooden shrouding remain, with the outline of the buckets that once caught the water still legible. It is an unusual degree of survival for machinery that has not turned in well over a hundred years. A two-storey extension built against the slope to the north appears to be the remnant of a grain-drying kiln, though its internal fittings are gone.

The history of the site moves through several hands and several trades in relatively quick succession. A man named William Ashton held the mill in 1796. A subsequent occupant named Barry used both mills for grinding corn and ran a bakery in the yard. In 1850 ownership passed to Edward O'Connor, known locally as Ned the Tucker, who converted the operation into a carding mill, a facility for combing and preparing wool fibres, and later expanded into spinning and weaving, producing flannel, blankets, frieze, and tweeds. By the early twentieth century his son John O'Connor had transformed it again, this time into a government laundry. The smaller mill to the south-east, a single-storey structure whose launder, the wooden trough that channelled water to the wheel, was carried on a stone causeway now largely collapsed, still contains a cement trough and a timber ramp that are likely remnants of that laundry phase. The Ordnance Survey mapped the site in 1842 as simply the Old Mill, with a millrace drawn from the river by a weir some 900 metres to the north; by 1906 it appeared as Carker Mill (Woollen), by which point the second smaller mill and a shared mill pond to the east were also recorded.