Mill news and topical information - Archive page 11

Small scale water turbines installed in Somerset watermills

Somerset watermills are running a pilot scheme to install water driven generators. 12 mills in South Somerset are taking part as the South Somerset Hydropower Group, at an average cost of £25,000 per site. Funding for the scheme has come from the Energy Saving Trust, a government-funded body for promoting renewable sources of power, and Green Electron, a "green" electricity supplier. Mill owners had to secure abstraction licences from the Environment Agency, to permit them to use water from the river.

At Gants Mill near Bruton, a 20kW generator will provide enough electricity for around 15 homes. Up to 15% of the 8000+ mill sites in the UK may be suitable for such power generation.
Item: #274, Posted: 15/3/04.

St Nicholas Abbey, St Peter for sale

It's rare that a pair of windmills comes up for sale, and to couple that with a substantial steam driven mill is rarer still. To surround all this with 400 acres of land, and a Jacobean great house gives a unique property - which if you haven't guessed is not in England, but in Barbados. St Nicholas Abbey is for sale for $7 million, and the mills in question were for sugar production. The details show a large mill wall, which would have been the cane crushing mill, and a smaller mill tower which would have been for water pumping. The steam-driven cane crushing engine was last used in 1947, but the estate still has half its land in sugar production.
Item: #273, Posted: 10/3/04.

Millwright Ian Clark returns to Salvage Squad

After an earlier appearance on Salvage Squad , working on Waltham Chase watermill, Hampshire, millwright Ian Clark has returned, to restore a WW2 mini submarine. The programme broadcast on Channel 4 on 9th March 2004 had some brief scenes from the earlier watermill restoration.
Item: #272, Posted: 9/3/04.

Artie's Mill, Brigg hotel complex changes hands

The Artie's Mill hotel and restaurant complex at Castlethorpe, near Brigg, has been bought by the Elizabeth Hotels Group in a million pound deal. The 50 staff will keep their jobs with the new owners, who are expecting to refurbish the hotel, spending £450,000 over 10 weeks.

The windmill at the centre of the complex had been owned by the grandfather, Arthur, of the Proctor brothers Barry and Jeff, who in 1984 spent £150,000 converting it into what is now a 20+ room hotel.
Mills: [Brigg]
Item: #271, Posted: 9/3/04.

More on Timms mill redevelopment plans

More details of the Timms mill redevelopment in Goole have been revealed. The plans show the demolition of the existing flour mill buildings, with just the windmill tower being retained within a central paved area with sculptures. Replacement buildings will have 6 retail units, with interest expressed from KFC, Halfords, Brantano, Chiltern Mill and Choices Video to occupy them, and 172 car parking places are included.
Mills: [Goole]
Item: #270, Posted: 9/3/04.

TIMS Dictionary of Molinology (draft available)

TIMS have been working on a four language (English, German, French and Dutch) Dictionary of Molinology. A draft copy is now available for download - stretching to 111 pages in PDF form.
Item: #269, Posted: 7/3/04.

Mills archive expands Suffolk and Lincolnshire coverage

The Mills Archive has uploaded a substantial set of new records now giving it extensive coverage of Suffolk and Lincolnshire (many of the items coming from the Peter Dolman collection). In addition the people database has been expanded with another 2000 records.

The Archive is also expanding its physical presence, into new archive storage space, which enables it to accept the important collection from the SPAB Mills section.
Item: #268, Posted: 5/3/04.

Windmill - Wind of the Spirit (instrumental music CD)

Windmill - Wind of the Spirit is a CD of instrumental music by Bob Benoit, played mainly on a wind synthesizer. Whilst not necessarily my kind of music, I have to declare an interest in this CD - the photo on the cover is one of my photos of Great Bardfield windmill, used with permission by the record company.
Mills: [Great Bardfield]
Item: #267, Posted: 2/3/04.

Images from old books

This site of Images from Old Books has been updated with a lot more images in the past few days.

Amongst the illustrations are

Guy's Cliffe Mill, Warwick
Iffley Mill, Oxfordshire
The Maid of the Mill from The World's Best Music: Famous Songs and Those Who Made Them

Item: #266, Posted: 2/3/04.

Wem mill, Shropshire, conversion plans

The mill at Wem, Shropshire is the subject of a planning application by Millhouse Ltd to convert the 170-year-old mill into 15 flats and build an extension which would provide another 12 apartments. Three flats and three maisonettes within the mill grounds have also been included in the plans. Local opposition is worried that the development is within the river flood plain.
Item: #265, Posted: 1/3/04.

Secret Shropshire - image archive

Secret Shropshire is an archive site that aims to help you discover the secrets of Shropshire's past. A search for windmill turns up illustrations of Cluddley windmill, and Lyth Hill windmill, obviously from various dates - but all entered into the archive as 2003 photos!
Mills: [Wrockwardine]
Item: #264, Posted: 1/3/04.

Philippa Pearce - stories of a childhood in the mill house

Since today was a February 29th - a day that only happens in leap years, the BBC radio programme Open Book was all about how novels treat time. As part of the programme, an interview with Philippa Pearce, author of Tom's Midnight Garden, related how the book is based on her childhood, where she grew up in the 1920's living in the mill house in the Cambridgeshire village of Great Shelford, with her father the last in a family of millers.
Item: #263, Posted: 29/2/04.

Access to interior of Clock Mill, Bromley By Bow

Although House Mill at Three Mills, Bromley By Bow is regularly open to the public, the adjacent Clock Mill is largely converted to offices, and hence has no public access. However, Copthorn Homes are currently building a block of apartments called Urban Island on the River Lea just north-east of House Mill, and have taken a ground floor suite of offices within Clock Mill to market the development. Thus for a while at least, it's possible to enter the Clock Mill to visit the sales office. Within the office area there are few reminders that you are in a mill, but in the lobby just by the entrance a pit wheel, upright shaft and spur wheel, together with some tentering gear is preserved as a feature, spotlit with coloured lighting.
Item: #262, Posted: 29/2/04.

St Benets Abbey sold to Trust

St Benets Abbey, Norfolk has been sold for a nominal sum to Norfolk Archaelogical Trust who recently bought the surrounding 36 acres of land off the Crown Estate for £55,000. The sale, by the diocese of the gatehouse and windmill means that the entire site is now in single ownership, which should allow for better management of the site as a whole. Work planned includes a scheme to combat riverbank erosion.
Mills: [Horning]
See also:Item #223
Item: #261, Posted: 28/2/04.

Tolkien stamps launched at Sarehole mill

The Royal Mail has launched a set of Tolkien stamps to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lord of the Rings. One of the launch events took place at Sarehole mill, Birmingham, where the original illustrations of which the stamps are reproductions have been on display.
See also:Item #178
Item: #260, Posted: 25/2/04.

Walking through Zaandijk en Koog aan de Zaan

A photo blog illustrating a walk through the villages of Zaandijk and Koog aan de Zaan in the Zaan area, The Netherlands, taken on 25th Jan 2004. Shows a number of the windmills from this important area where windmills were put to all manner of industrial uses, and also the area's windmill museum which underwent extensive renovations in 2003.
Item: #259, Posted: 25/2/04.

Northern Ireland Buildings Database

The Northern Ireland Buildings Database holds information on over 9,000 historic buildings. Amongst those a search for windmill turns up 14 entries, though a search for the wider mill term is rather dominated by place names that include mill in them. The database includes both listed buildings, and also buildings which have been recorded, but not given any particular classification or protection.
Item: #258, Posted: 24/2/04.

Danish mill archive

A new collection of Danish windmills and watermills has made it on to the web. The site currently covers 64 Danish mills - with a photo and a description of the mill in Danish, for each.
Item: #257, Posted: 24/2/04.

West Blatchington windmill photos

The collection of windmills covered by Rough Wood has today added a couple of views of West Blatchington
Mills: [West Blatchington]
Item: #256, Posted: 24/2/04.

Dutch bulbfields supplying Valentine's Day purchasers

Reuters reported that Valentine's Day caused prices to soar on the world's biggest flower market as Dutch traders bid for millions of blossoms ahead of Valentine's Day. They illustrated this with a file photo showing a tulip field and mill in the small Dutch town of Lisse.
Item: #255, Posted: 18/2/04.

Bread and Milling - The Staff of Life

There is an exhibition from Saturday 14th February until Sunday 9th May 2004, at Mill Green museum, Hatfield. Entitled "Bread and Milling - The Staff of Life", the exhibition takes a look at the history of milling and breadmaking, and how much or how little the process of making a loaf of bread over the past 5000 years has changed. What did 'Roman' flour taste like? Why is bread so good for you? Lots of activities for children including grinding their own flour. Frequent opportunities for tasting bread from different eras of history.
Item: #254, Posted: 17/2/04.

Windmills of New England - Their genius, madness,history & future

I've just received and reviewed this book by Dan Lombardo, on the Windmills of New England. It's very close to the book I imagined writing on the same subject - and as such answers many of the questions I came away with from my own trips to explore the Windmills of Cape Cod. I'm particularly glad to see that Dan has discovered that the first structure you see as you cross onto the Cape at Sagamore was indeed built as a workable mill - even though it now serves mostly as an `advertisement for the "Christmas Tree Shop".
Item: #253, Posted: 17/2/04.

Sickle cut millstone photo - Somerville, Massachusetts

There's no description, but the photo of a millstone makes for a dramatic image. The stone is sickle cut, and has been turned into a memorial to Jean Mallett's windmill, 1704-1747 (I think - its not totally clear due to the angle the photo was taken at). I'll have to find out where that mill was!

Update:[17/2/04] The millstone is at Powderhouse Square in Somerville, Massachusetts. It commemorates the mill which still exists (in the form of a powder house) in nearby Nathan Tufts Park.
Item: #252, Posted: 15/2/04.

Stone Cross windmill photo in Amateur Photographer

The 14th Feb 2004 edition of Amateur Photographer includes a photo of Stone Cross windmill as one of the images in the featured "reader's portfolio" by Ray Bridges. The photo, looking up at the tower from below makes for a dramatic shot, but as with all such unusual angles, distorts the true representation of the building.
Mills: [Westham]
Item: #251, Posted: 15/2/04.

Jonathan Creek - 5th series, website, and DVDs

The latest series (the 5th) of Jonathan Creek started on 14th Feb 2004. At least in the first episode, Shipley windmill, which has served as the title character's home in previous series, did not appear.

However, there's also a website from the BBC to accompany the series, and a new DVD box set of Series 1 and 2 in which the windmill does feature.
Mills: [Shipley]
See also:Item #30
Item: #250, Posted: 15/2/04.

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