The mill draws its water from the Cammock River via a millrace, a channel cut specifically to divert river water and control its flow onto a wheel, and it sits in a corridor of ground that has been given over to milling in some form for at least four centuries.

The site appears on two mid-seventeenth-century surveys conducted in the years following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Both the Down Survey, compiled between 1655 and 1656 and directed by William Petty as a systematic mapping of forfeited Irish lands, and the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a written record of landholdings documented by Simington in 1945, place a mill at this location. This means the Paper Mill, as it came to be known, was not built fresh onto open ground but rather established itself on a working site with an already documented milling history. The fact that it was later used for papermaking rather than grain milling points to how industrial use of water-powered sites shifted over time, paper production having expanded considerably in Ireland during the eighteenth century as demand for printed material grew.

The site lies south of the Cammock River and directly north of Drimnagh Castle, one of the few remaining castles in Dublin with a functioning flooded moat. The proximity of the two sites means a visitor can take in both within a short walk. The millrace, the engineered channel that once fed the wheel, traces a line off the Cammock, and though milling activity has long since ceased, the geography that made the site viable, the river, the flat ground, the relationship between castle and working waterway, remains legible if you know what you are looking at.