Elsecar Mill

This list entry was subject to a Minor Enhancement on 23/10/2020

SE30SE 2/18

HOYLAND NETHER Elsecar WATH ROAD (east side) Elsecar Mill

23.4.74

II

Flour mill, now business premises, 1842 for the Fitzwilliam estate.

MATERIALS: Coursed, hammer-dressed sandstone, Welsh slate roof.

EXTERIOR: of three storeys and six bays above a half-basement with a single-storey addition to the front right (south-west). The third bay from the north has an enlarged doorway, the fifth bay has a panelled door set in an ashlar surround. To the third bay on the first-floor there is a round-arched loading door with a gabled wooden gantry above to the second-floor. Windows, boarded at time of resurvey in the 1980s, have projecting sills and plain lintels. There are brick stacks to the south gable set central to the roof slopes, with a truncated stone chimney to rear-left (north-east) corner. The low addition to the south west has two windows to the front gable.

INTERIOR: much renewed but retains original cast-iron stanchions and principal ceiling beams. The roof retains exposed pattern-book king-post trusses.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: from the late C18, Elsecar was the industrial village of the Earls Fitzwilliam, whose seat of Wentworth Woodhouse lies nearby. At Elsecar they invested in coal mining and iron working, erecting industrial buildings along with good quality workers’ housing and a range of other urban facilities including a church and school, all within what had been an agricultural landscape. The survival of many of these buildings makes Elsecar an important and significant place, telling the story of three centuries of coal mining, Christian paternalism, and industrial boom and decline. The flour mill, one of the industrial developments for the Fifth Earl Fitzwilliam (1786-1857) was originally steam-powered.

Listing NGR: SE3875600207