The Mill Building

The Mill Building

This is a former water-powered cornmill, later converted to storage and used as carpentry and joinery workshops. The present building dates to the early 19th century.

The mill stands at the northern corner of the mill pond and has an L-shaped plan. It comprises a three-storey range containing the mill machinery, arranged north-east to south-west, with a long two-storey ancillary range extending to the south-east. The south-west elevation of the ancillary range is reduced to one storey due to the slope of the ground.

The ground floor is built of red brick with some grey headers. The upper storeys are timber-framed with weatherboard cladding and pitched slate roofs.

The north-west front elevation features three early 19th-century metal casement windows and a stable-type door on the ground floor. The first floor has two early 19th-century metal casements and a centrally placed double hoist door with a timber hood and brackets. The south-western ground-floor wall of the mill range is constructed of tooled sandstone ashlar blocks where it adjoins the leat containing the overshot waterwheel. This elevation has three iron casements—two at first-floor level and one at the top of the gable. The north-east elevation has a large doorway with a modern garage door and metal casement on the ground floor, metal casements on the first floor and in the gable. The ancillary range has a mix of timber casements, uPVC replacements, 20th-century fixed glazing and two metal casements to the single-storey south-west elevation. Doors are mainly original, though original hoist doors to the centre of the north-east elevation have been replaced with weatherboarding.

Interior

The mill range interior consists of three floors. The ground floor contains a stud partition at the south-west end enclosing the primary gearing, which transmitted power from the waterwheel. The partition is framed by four oak posts supporting the millstones on the floor above, with a number of timber inspection hatches. A doorway with concrete-block jambs at the south-east corner leads to a small space latterly used as an office and canteen. A timber stair in the south-west corner provides access to the first floor, which contains the milling machinery at its south-west end. The second floor is occupied by full-height timber grain bins, which were stocked from a central walkway at attic level, reached by a timber stair from the first floor. The interior retains virtually all its original structural timber. The roof structure contains a mixture of original and later machine-sawn replacement elements, including rafters and purlins. The first floor of the ancillary range has a large room, originally containing auxiliary mill machinery, with modern regular roof trusses. The ground floor of the range contains a number of small storage, workshop and office rooms, and a WC.

Machinery

The overshot waterwheel was a hybrid wooden and cast-iron type. The cast-iron naves, each with eight arms, survive, but the wooden shrouds and iron floats have been lost. The octagonal timber wheelshaft is a replacement dating to circa 1962. The brick-walled wheel house has been demolished.

The early 19th-century machinery inside is largely complete. The primary gearing on the ground floor comprises a cast-iron pit wheel with wooden cogs, a cast-iron wallower, a square-section main drive shaft, a cast-iron spur wheel with wooden cogs, and two of the original three stone nuts with their tentering gear. A centrifugal governor is also present, connected to the two remaining millstones by an iron lever. This unusual feature for a watermill evens out fluctuations in the gearing.

At first-floor level, two of the originally three pairs of millstones remain. One pair is virtually complete with its wooden octagonal stone tun, horse and shoe, though the hopper is missing. The other surviving pair has been dismantled with missing furniture. A screw conveyor also survives, which allowed several meal sacks to be filled simultaneously.

Above the millstones, the secondary gearing powered sack lifts and other ancillary machinery. It comprises a crown wheel with wooden cogs at the top of the main shaft, and two lay shafts slung from hangers fixed to the second-floor joists and connected to the crown wheel by bevelled pinions. The lay shafts have a number of cast-iron pulley wheels at first-floor level. The downstream shaft powered the sack hoist at attic level, where the wooden pulley block and spindle for the sack chains survives. The upstream lay shaft powered pulleys connected to grain cleaning and flour dressing and mixing machinery. This machinery has been removed, but a number of associated cast-iron and wooden pulley wheels survive in situ.