Mill House Swanton Mill

Swanton Mill and Mill House is a complex of buildings dating from the 15th century to the mid-19th century. It is a timber-framed and red-brick mill with a house attached, with weatherboarded and red brick cladding and extended with timber framing and weatherboarding. The roof is tiled, with slated gables. The original core of the building is a 3-bay hall house from the 15th century, with the 2-story service end adapted for milling, featuring a wheel attached to a gable end. The wheel was housed within a 17th-century timber extension. A 3-bay lobby entry house from the 16th century is attached to the west and incorporates the parlour end, with an 18th-century range added to the north. Mid-19th-century extensions were added to the south and east of the mill buildings.

The mill house, facing north, has an 18th-century weatherboarded frontage. It is two stories high, with a hipped roof and stacks to the left end and to the rear centre right. It features three wooden casements on the first floor and two on the ground floor, all with moulded cornices. A central door consists of four panels with a glazed upper section, topped with a flat cornice hood. The right return is of red brick with a dogtooth cornice, and includes a single-story extension. The left-hand wing is recessed, revealing a hip-end of the 15th-century range, clad in red brick and featuring a dogtooth eaves cornice. The rear range of the house is clad in red and blue brick, in part in a garden wall bond, set on a ragstone plinth, with two wooden casements to each floor.

The mill section has a stepped-up ridge line to its north end. A 17th-century range of one story and an attic, with a half-hipped roof and a gabled roof-light, is present. This section has three wooden casements and a half-glazed half-door, alongside a horizontally sliding sash and a wooden casement in the single-story extensions. A two-story mid-19th-century block extends to the rear, featuring a gabled hoist housing on the southern elevation and wooden casements. It stands on brick piers above the mill race.

The interior of the mill shows that the northern end was originally a hall house with a crown post roof blackened by smoke. The 17th-century range incorporates the wheel. The present wheel, installed by Holmans of Canterbury, is an unusually sized overshot wheel (7½ feet in diameter, 8 feet wide) with 42 buckets, now feeding two wheels, originally capable of driving four. A single-story extension to the south of the mill, added in 1841, once housed a beam engine (now removed). An early-19th-century grain store is located above the mill race. The sluices, constructed of wood, iron and stone, control the water flow and are located to the east of the mill, built with a red brick and ragstone lined mill race. The stream is culverted from the mill, passing below the garden to the south of the house.