The Firs And Weston Mill

The Firs and Weston Mill is a mill and attached mill house located near Oswestry. The mill dates to the mid-19th century and was built on an earlier site, erected after 1841 to replace a woolen mill destroyed by fire. The present mill originally produced corn and cotton but switched to flour in the late 19th century, ceasing work during the 1930s.

The mill is constructed of roughly coursed local grey limestone blocks with yellow brick dressings, beneath slate roofs with deep eaves and verges. It rises to four storeys and adopts a rectangular plan with pedimented gable ends facing east and west. The eastern gable features boarded doors on each floor flanked by ground-floor windows, with a bracketed weatherboarded hoist projection at the top. The western gable displays a circular window at its apex. The north wall contains four segmental-headed mullioned and transomed casements on each floor, some retaining leaded lights. The south wall has paired windows to the centre of the second and third floors, with the lower left window blind; the outline of a demolished lower gabled structure is visible to the right.

A massive iron undershot wheel, still in working order, is housed beneath a segmental arch to the rear of the adjoining mill house.

The mill house (The Firs) adjoins to the west and is of two storeys with four bays to the front. It features late 20th-century windows set within original yellow brick cambered arches. A 20th-century door with rectangular overlight sits within a 19th-century pilastered doorcase in the third bay from the left. Yellow brick ridge and end stacks are present, with a lower range to the right. The rear south wall has 20th-century casements.

The mill interior contains an oak winder staircase in the north-east corner rising to the fourth floor. The ground floor houses the pitwheel against the west wall, which meshes with a pinion on a horizontal shaft running parallel to the south wall, mounted within an iron hurst frame with cast-iron columns and stone pans. The first floor originally held four pairs of French burr millstones, marked by makers including "Davies & Snead, 19 & 21 Cheapside, Liverpool" and "Cotton & Davies, Cheapside, Liverpool", though the stone furniture is now missing. An upright shaft rises through the floors, carrying a bevel gear on the second floor with an associated layshaft running north-south across the mill with pulleys. The shaft continues to the third floor above a bevel crown wheel meshing with a bevel gear on an east-west layshaft. The fourth floor has two hoist drums (one timber, one iron) driven from a vertical shaft, and a smutter with vertical spindle, case, and fan towards the western end. A king-post roof structure is present.

A mill pond fed by a leat lies immediately south of the mill house, with a well-preserved sluice controlling water flow into the penstock and thence to the wheel. Remains of walls to the south of the mill may be fragments of an earlier mill.