The site is easy to overlook, overgrown since a fire in 1969 gutted the buildings and ended eight centuries of almost continuous milling. What makes it quietly remarkable is the depth of the record behind those walls: from a throwaway clause in a medieval charter to a nineteenth-century workforce of five hundred people producing heavy woollen blankets, the place accumulated history the way its mill races accumulated water.

The story begins with the Anglo-Norman reshaping of Kilkenny. The crosslands at Dukesmeadows were drawn into the seignorial demesne of Kilkenny Castle, and a mill was probably built by William Marshal, earl of Pembroke and lord of Leinster, whose 1207 charter to the town mentions his mills and a toll for burgesses to grind their grain. By 1307, a survey of the possessions of Joan, Countess of Gloucester and Hereford, noted six mills in the borough in poor condition. In 1399 the third earl of Ormond granted the profits of four mills, likely including this one, to William Archer, whose family reconstructed the complex and may have added new buildings after 1432. The Archers held the mills until Cromwellian forces attacked Kilkenny in March 1650 and their properties were confiscated. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records the site precisely: three mills under one roof, two for corn and one described as a tucking mill (a tucking or fulling mill was used to clean and thicken woven cloth by pounding it), with stone walls and a slate roof, the tenant at the time of the town's taking listed as Thomas Archer. A roughly contemporary view by Francis Place, dating to around 1699, shows a single long one-storey building with its gable turned to the river and a mill race running beneath it. By 1758, when John Rocque mapped it, the complex had grown to two large buildings with at least four mill wheels, one of them fed by the newly begun Kilkenny Canal. In 1783 John Butler of Kilkenny Castle leased the Ormond Mills to Mathias Scott, a millwright, for three lives at a yearly rent of fifty pounds. The firm of Kenny, Scott and Co. subsequently expanded production considerably, employing around five hundred people and concentrating on heavy woollen cloth. Pigot's Directory of 1824 still called it Ormond Mills, as did the first Ordnance Survey map of 1839 to 1840, by which point the complex had grown further into the configuration mapped as the Ormonde Woollen Mills.

An industrial archaeological survey carried out in 1990 found the remains of six undershot mill wheels and three mill races still surviving, along with the footprint of the medieval mill, destroyed above ground level. Undershot wheels are driven by water flowing beneath them along a race, making them well suited to the steady current of a river exiting a meander, exactly the hydrological advantage that drew millers to this bend in the Nore in the first place. Excavation of the riverbanks between 2000 and 2001 turned up medieval material concentrated around the mill complex, adding physical depth to what the documents already suggest: that this patch of riverside meadow has been shaping and shaped by the city beside it since at least the early thirteenth century.