Mill Cottage

CHARLCOMBE

146/5/250 WOOLLEY LANE 03-APR-90 (West side) MILL COTTAGE

II

Former gunpowder incorporating mill, now house. Early -mid C18; converted to house in first half of C19; altered mid and late C20. Limestone rubble with dressed quoins; wany-edged horizontal boarding; pantile hipped roof. 2 storeys; gable-end on. Roadside elevation; quoins. Originally open-fronted, now infilled with C20 horizontal boarding and having C20 garage doors to ground floor and 2 late-C20 windows above. Hipped roof. Right return: various blocked openings relating to original use. Left return: various C20 doors, windows, dormer and additions. Interior has retained no visible features of interest. HISTORY: The Woolley Gunpowder Works operated from the 1720s to c.1803. It was the first of three in Somerset which were started to supply local mining interests and also foreign markets through the port of Bristol, and all of which closed by the mid-C19. Woolley is important mostly as evidence of the dispersion of gunpowder making away from the South East during the C18. The location alongside the wheel pit of the earlier corn mill suggests milling also took place here. The light construction of the front was possibly intended to direct blast from an accidental explosion. An altered but very rare surviving example of its type, one of only two extant (and two other excavated) examples.

B J Buchanan and M T Tucker, "The Manufacture of Gunpowder: a study of the docu- mentary and physical evidence relating to the Woolley Powder Works near Bath", Industrial Archaeology Review, V, 3, Autumn 1981, pp 185-202; Brenda Buchanan, "The Technology of Gunpowder Making in the Eighteenth Century: Evidence from the Bristol Region", Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. 67 (1995-6).

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Listing NGR: ST7503468792