What once amounted to a cluster of working mills, recorded in remarkable detail by mid-seventeenth-century surveyors, has long since been replaced by later structures, the original machinery and millraces absorbed into the city's slow sprawl.

The evidence for milling activity here comes from two sources that overlap neatly. The Down Survey, carried out between 1655 and 1656 under the direction of William Petty as a means of mapping confiscated Irish land for Cromwellian redistribution, recorded no fewer than two double mills and a single mill at Kilmainham. A double mill, broadly speaking, was a mill operating two sets of grinding stones, making it a more substantial and productive enterprise than a simple single-wheel operation. These same mills were then marked on Bernard de Gomme's map of the City and Suburbs of Dublin, produced in 1673, which offers a rare visual cross-reference confirming their presence and rough location. De Gomme was a military engineer who had served Charles II, and his Dublin map was made with the practical eye of someone documenting the city's infrastructure as much as its streets. That later mill buildings came to occupy the same site, as noted by Simington in 1945, suggests the location retained its usefulness into subsequent centuries, even as the original structures were replaced.

The site sits within the broader Kilmainham area, which is well served by public transport and closely associated with the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and the nearby gaol. There is no surviving physical trace of the seventeenth-century mills themselves to seek out, but visitors interested in the layering of Dublin's industrial history may find it worth pausing here with a copy of the Down Survey maps, available through the Trinity College Dublin digital collections, to read the landscape against what those surveyors recorded. The River Camac, which runs through this part of the city, would have provided the water source for such mills, and its course, though much altered, is still traceable in places for those who know to look for it.