Unthank Mill, Houses and Cow House Attached is a Grade II listed building in the County Durham local planning authority area, England. First listed on 8 July 1976. Mill, house, cow-house.

Unthank Mill, Houses and Cow House Attached

WRENN ID
tangled-cinder-ash
Grade
II
Local Planning Authority
County Durham
Constituency
Bishop Auckland MP: Dr Sam Rushworth (Lab)
Country
England
Date first listed
8 July 1976
Type
Mill, house, cow-house
Address
Unthank Mill, Houses and Cow House Attached, B6278, Stanhope
OS grid reference
NY 993 391
Coordinates
54.74693, -2.01104
Source
Historic England listing

Also on this page: flood risk · radon risk · weather exposure · detailed attributes ↓

Description

Unthank Mill, house, and cow-house, now all functioning as a cow-house, date from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The building is constructed of coursed sandstone rubble with tooled and pecked ashlar dressings and features a stone-flagged roof. It is arranged in an L-plan, with two storeys, four bays, and a one-storey wheel-house on the right. A two-storey addition from the 19th century projects from the left side.

The mill section on the right has a tooled surround to a partly-blocked central doorway, with flat stone lintels over a boarded loft opening and flanking windows, the left window being smaller. The wheel-house features a wooden lintel over its door. The 19th-century addition has pecked stone lintels and projecting stone sills for the ground floor and first-floor openings, which are boarded up. The low-pitched roofs, with parallel ridges, have three ridge chimneys, two of which are truncated. The right return rear wing includes a plain stone surround to a Dutch door and flanking windows.

Inside, there is much machinery, including a pit wheel, with all visible gears and cogs made of whitish wood. There are two bed-stones on the floor above, and while the water wheel is missing, a sluice for the undershot is partly surviving. The cow-house at the rear has two internal boarded partitions and three V-shaped plank feeding troughs between the stalls.

Outside the mill, there is one upper stone on the ground. The building was noted as decaying and derelict at the time of the survey, although some roof timbers have been renewed.

Local climate

Unthank Mill, Houses and Cow House Attached sits in a wetter-than-average part of the UK, with an average of 960 mm of rain a year. This makes it wetter than 75% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is lower than that of 59% of listed buildings.

It experiences an average of 58 freeze-thaw cycles a year, more than 97% of listed buildings. Of these, 38 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.

Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.

More on this building

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  • Detailed attributes — period, style, materials, features
  • Flood risk assessment
  • Radon risk assessment
  • Weather exposure and heating demand — rain and frost month by month and year by year, wind direction, solar and humidity
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