Former Ingleborough Estate saw mill with log store

Former Ingleborough Estate Saw Mill with Log Store

This is a barn dating from the late 18th or early 19th century, originally used as a bobbin mill in the mid-19th century. Around 1870, the Ingleborough Estate converted it into a water-powered saw mill and timber workshop. From 1890 to 1938, it was also used to generate electricity for lighting the village.

The main building is constructed of local rubble limestone with horizontally tooled quoins and lintels, and a slate roof laid to diminishing courses. The eastern part of the northern lean-to is built of concrete blockwork and concrete-covered brickwork, thought to date from the late 19th century.

The building is two storeys tall, eight bays long, and quoined throughout. The southern elevation features three reasonably evenly-spaced ground floor windows with neatly dressed stone surrounds. Two first floor windows at the eastern end are off-set from those below and have rough surrounds with thinner lintels and sills. All windows are divided into small panes. Faint marks in the stonework between the western two windows suggest the western end may be an early extension to the original barn.

The eastern gable has two doorways: a low doorway just north of centre with a neatly tooled surround matching the ground floor windows, and a regular-height inserted doorway abutting the southern quoins. Hints of possible blocked first floor windows remain in the stonework. The top of the gable above eaves height appears to have been rebuilt or repointed.

The western gable contains two large ground floor doorways, both quoined. The northern doorway, the larger of the two, extends across nearly the full width of the northern half of the elevation and is fitted with an externally hung sliding door. This was where unsawn logs entered the mill. The saw feed-track—a dwarf wall with concrete plinth fitted with iron brackets to hold removable rollers—extends from about 8 metres west of the building into the mill through this entrance. The rollers survive and were stored inside the building as of 2020. The southern doorway is a pedestrian entrance with a timber boarded door. At first floor height, south of the centreline, is a taking-in doorway outlined with slim monolithic jambs and lintels, later converted into a window. Close to the apex of the gable is a small opening fitted with an iron bracket carrying four projections, interpreted as fixings for four overhead electricity cables, possibly part of the 1890 lighting installation for the village. A later bracket with a ceramic insulator for an overhead electric cable is attached to the south-west corner.

The northern elevation is obscured by a lean-to extension. The western part of this lean-to is rubble-stone built with quoining to both corner and western window, this quoining being rougher than that on the main building. The remainder of the lean-to is rendered but is reported to be built of concrete blockwork and concrete-covered brickwork, both thought to date from the late 19th century.

The interior retains a water-powered circular saw set into a bench at the centre of the main building on a series of masonry supports. The saw incorporates a pair of metal plates set on rollers with a gap between to accommodate the blade, and a control wheel extending to the side, all interpreted as a late 19th century powered roller-feed possibly installed in 1885. An Empire planer-thicknesser stands nearby. Power transmission operates via belt drives from a drive shaft set within pits below the floor. The shaft is powered by a water turbine located within the western end of the northern lean-to extension, a Vortex turbine built by Gilbert Gilkes and Company Limited, thought to have been installed in 1907. Fixed to the ceiling above is an axle with belt-drive drums providing power transmission to this machine and to machinery formerly on the upper floor. The interior walls are generally roughly lime-rendered and include various alcoves, openings and fittings related to its Victorian use as a saw mill and timber workshop, along with many later fittings. Stud partitions are thought to be later insertions.

The saw feed-track runs through the building as an open-plan space. Uncut logs entered via the large opening in the west gable, and cut timber passed through a smaller door in the east gable. Cut timber could also be passed to the upper floor via a trapdoor in the ceiling at the western end, or through a first floor loading door in the west gable (now a window). The upper floor is accessed via a staircase and trapdoor at the eastern end of the main building, and also via a mezzanine floor within the northern lean-to. The lean-to extension on the northern wall is unequally divided into three rooms, the westernmost being the turbine power room.

To the west of the saw mill stands the log store, a largely open-sided single-storey stone-built structure consisting of a southern wall and five square pillars supporting a simple A-frame roof covered in slates.