Where a working water mill once turned somewhere in the south of the city, there is now nothing to see, no stonework, no millrace, no trace of the machinery that would have ground grain for the surrounding population. Its existence is known almost entirely because two mid-seventeenth-century surveys happened to record it, and without those documents it would have slipped from the record entirely.

The earliest evidence comes from the Down Survey, carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty. The Down Survey was a vast mapping project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to document landholding across Ireland, largely in order to facilitate the redistribution of confiscated Catholic lands to soldiers and settlers. A mill appears on the Down Survey map of this area, and by the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1837, the site was being labelled as Rutland Mill, suggesting the name had some currency locally even if the structure itself may already have been in decline or gone. The mill is also noted in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a companion document to the Down Survey that recorded land values, ownership, and features in written form rather than cartographic, and its inclusion there, as noted by Simington in his 1945 edition of those records, confirms the site was a recognised working feature of the landscape at that period.

For anyone curious enough to look, the exercise is largely one of archival detection rather than fieldwork. Both the Down Survey maps and the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets are freely available online and can be overlaid against modern mapping to get a rough sense of where the mill would have stood. Beyond that, there is nothing on the ground to examine, no heritage marker, no surviving fabric. The value of the site, such as it is, lies in what it suggests about the milling infrastructure of early modern Dublin, a city that depended on numerous small mills distributed across its rivers and streams, most of which have left equally faint traces.