Park Mill Farm

Park Mill Farm is a former mill house, later converted to a farmhouse, dating from the 18th century with alterations and extensions in the later 19th century. A ruined range of industrial buildings is attached to the south-east.

Materials and Construction

The house is constructed from roughly squared and coursed stone rubble with dressed limestone quoins, set under a clay tile roof with brick stacks and a small rear extension in brick. The ruined mill buildings include substantial amounts of blue lias stone blocks.

Plan

The mill house is a single-depth rectangle on plan, oriented north-west to south-east, with an L-shaped extension at the north-eastern end. The ruined former mill buildings run in a linear range from the south-eastern end of the house.

Exterior

The building is of two storeys and attic, and is four bays long. There is a lean-to extension to the north-west, behind which is the rear extension. The main elevation has irregular fenestration with large areas of blank walling. Windows include a mixture of eight-over-eight 18th-century sashes, two-over-two horned sashes of the 19th century, and some later 19th-century casements. The sashes all have exposed sash boxes and are set under timber lintels with timber or stone sills.

The entrance door is positioned towards the north-western end and has a 20th-century timber canopy porch. The south-eastern bay, formerly the industrial end of the building, has a wide ground-floor opening with a similar opposing opening to the rear. Its attic window, in contrast with the rest of the range, is a raking half-dormer.

The rear elevation has a row of 18th-century eight-over-eight sash windows set under the eaves, with two-over-two horned sashes of the 19th century below, and in the later 19th-century extension. Large blocked openings at ground floor, first floor and attic level include a taking-in door to the first floor, indicating that a large part of the house was formerly in industrial use.

Interior

The interior has two contrasting elements. The south-eastern bay remains entirely industrial in character, with the rooms—one on each floor—unimproved and unheated. They are characterised by wide door openings, exposed chamfered beams of large section, and an enclosed timber stair with very plain treads and risers set against the gable wall and rising through the building.

The remainder of the house bears evidence of its conversion to a farmhouse in the latter years of the 19th century. There is a roughly symmetrical plan, with principal rooms to either side of the central stair hall, which has a late 19th-century stair with turned newels and plain stick balusters. Several fireplaces of the late 19th century, with timber surrounds and cast-iron grates, survive in situ. There is internal joinery of the 18th and 19th centuries. The brick extension to the rear has exposed purlins and late 19th-century doors.

Subsidiary Features

To the south-eastern end of the house, the ruined remains of the mill range is attached. The buildings run in a linear arrangement across the top of the dam, which is built from a mixture of lias and limestone blocks topped by several courses of very large fired clay blocks.

The leat ran from the north-eastern corner of the dam through a stone-built sluice, which partly survives, with very large long-and-short-work stone blocks standing to a height of around 2 metres. The vestigial remains of the timber sluice gates are in situ.

The former fulling mill is identifiable in the ruins. It remained water powered, though the site of the wheel is not readily discernible other than through maps. A large stone stack, which appears to have risen to the attic drying room, survives to a height of around 4 metres. Iron-clad openings for drive gear are evident in this and the adjacent buildings.

At the far south-eastern end of the range is a small brick building, perhaps a stable, which dates from the later 19th century and, together with a further small group of brick outbuildings to the south-west of the house, is associated with the conversion of the site to a farm.

History

The current buildings on the site appear to date from the 18th and earlier 19th centuries, though the mill may have originated rather earlier. There have been attempts to identify the site with the 'Berkemyll' detailed in the 1537 lease book for Kingswood Abbey, a nearby religious house which was surrendered in 1538 and demolished in the 1540s. There is no precise evidence for the original position of the abbey or its mill, and it has not been possible to say with certainty whether this, or one of the other two cloth mills in the village, was the Berkemyll, though from documentary sources and some evidence in the fabric it remains a possibility that this mill could be identified with Park Mill.

The oldest extant structures on the site appear to be the dam and associated sluice. It seems likely that these were constructed perhaps as far back as the 17th century, and may incorporate some earlier fabric. These would have been associated with a mill building situated at the head of the dam. The mill house was constructed to the north-west during the 18th century, and the earlier mill buildings replaced or remodelled in the 18th or 19th century.

The mill is recorded as being owned by woollen cloth manufacturers Samuel and William Long in a trade directory of 1830, and another woollen cloth manufacturer, John Smith, in 1842. An L-shaped extension to the north-west end of the mill house was made before 1882, at which time the buildings were still in use for the production of textiles. By 1903, however, the mill is marked as disused on the Ordnance Survey map, and it had been converted to a farm, with some associated remodelling of the former mill house.

The deeper range of industrial buildings running south-eastwards from the house were still standing until the mid-20th century. A description from the 1950s confirms the evidence of a photograph of the same period, when the buildings comprised seven elements, running from south-east to north-west: a counting house; a part-domestic and part-industrial block in ruins; a store house; a three-storey weaving and spinning shop; a water-powered fulling mill with a cloth-drying room over; another small industrial section; and the mill house.

Soon after this the remaining mill buildings were partly demolished, though at the time of inspection in December 2008 all had some walls and other features still standing to varying heights, including a large stack in what was the corner of the mill, and openings with cast iron elements to house drive gear running throughout the range. The large mill pond is now dry but its steep banks and associated dam and sluice survive to the rear of the farmhouse.