1000 Years! - Sturminster Newton Water Mill

well Peter Loosemore we haven't actually picked the best weather but we're here now this fabulous mill a very very ancient property indeed and Peter your history goes back a very long way with this mill something a little bit of iesson well I was looking for a job about 20 years ago and I suddenly saw a small advert in a local paper which said they wanted someone to look after store mr. mill and my grandfather was the Miller here for all his life so it seemed to me perhaps I'd give it a go and I knew nothing about milling but I applied for the job and luckily they gave me the post well I should think so because I think in in the family blood really but roughly how long has this mill been here on the side of this river as far as we are aware that mill has been here for 999 years at the moment it was given to the abbot of glastonbury by King Edmund Ironside in 1016 so we're pretty sure that um the the king of Wessex wouldn't have given the one of the richest Abbey's in the country a load of old peasant huts so I'm pretty sure and others will agree with me that there would have been a manor house here and the mill and so on and is certainly verified by the Domesday books on 70 years later well this is an absolutely massive massive body of water and of course the River Stour over the years it's been used so many times in so many different ways milling one of the main industries here for a long time though along these river banks the big question is with such a huge force of water particularly when you get weather like we have at the moment how do you build a mill that will withstand it how does it actually all work well building a mill was I suppose for something of a mystery really and one has to remember that the mills been here for certainly over a thousand years and how on earth they managed to dam this force of water in those days with that none of the modern mechanics that we have is it's open to speculation I think at the very least but this is quite a strong flow today but sometimes it flows much much stronger than this and we could even be here up to our necks in water on on a very flooded winter day but the river flows pretty steadily all through the summer the very fact that it's called the Stour I believe means strong meaning that it was a strong flowing river and so it went on flowing all through the summer time we very rarely use all the water that's coming down here and this huge amount of water which is bypassing us at the moment really is extra to our needs everything here is spare as far as we're concerned we use a very very small amount of water coming in through the corner right over behind us well that's really where we want to start isn't it to have a look to see how this whole structure works had the mill has evolved from those very early days hundreds of years ago nearly a thousand years ago so can we go and have a look inside the machine itself we can indeed yes yes so we're gonna start with one side but I believe this was actually two mills originally as well that's right the part which is closest to us here was originally a fulling mill for working a type of cloth called Swan skin and that was woven in the local cottages here brought down here to be fooled in other words big trip hammers operated by the water power beat the cloth and broke up the fibers made it softer and so on and most of the cloth here the swan skin was exported to the for the very early days of the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland so it was shipped across the newfoundland dinner-theater the more you say the more riveting it gets and we're going to get very wet in a moment so I suggested we go let's start at the bottom and work our way up and let's explore the machine that is the water milk okay let's go inside then out of the rain what pizza have come into the main body of the mill now and really in effect it's actually like walking into an engine actually getting inside and seeing how it all works now we're going to get to to fire it up in a moment but first of all you're saying that this end of the building here was originally a different mill as well there was also a waterwheel here that ran as an offset waterwheel why was the big difference between a waterwheel and the turbine Wyatt what's the benefit for prettier turbine in and when would it have happened the main benefit of the turbine was simply to produce more power there were two water wheels here in fact not quite side-by-side they were offset so that one was a little further back in than the other they were under shot wheels and each one has been estimated made around about six horsepower that gave the Miller 12 horsepower to work with the turbine immediately gave them something in the region of about 24 to 25 horsepower they were really struggling to compete with big steam-powered late Victorian Mills and which could of course could be built anywhere so he didn't have to be down by the water on the top of the hill to get the power that you needed and of course it is saying and this is an undershirt the original wheels were under shots difference in under shots and overshot and I'm guessing the star not a huge rise on it hasn't no that's right so most of the mills around here were under shot wheels and we have in fact the head of something in the region of about 4 foot 11 inches here on a normal day so we couldn't bring water over the top of the the water wheel it had to rush underneath and in effect turn the wheel backwards and they were always the least efficient of water wheels and the turbine also had one or two other advantages the main one being that for the very first time they put a flywheel into the system so once you've got a big flywheel this is a two-ton flywheel here and that kept everything working at a nice steady pace and of course that improved the output of the mill well I think pizza there's a loss of mechanics kay a lot of engineering Kayani and i think the best thing is probably to see it actually fire up and then we can run through it as it comes up through and all the different systems kick into action yes ok so Aaron only takes a couple of minutes so let's get going a couple more turns they're off oh look - so you did that more by eye than anything yes that's right it depends entirely on the levels of the water normally I give it about 25 26 turns and then I feel its stiffen up and at that stage I give it about another 7 turns and away we go so judging the volume to create the amount of power that you require that's really just something you learn you just just by experience yes what I've been doing is lifting a sluice gate at the very back of the mill there and that allows water to come into the turbine and the more water you let into the turbine the quicker it'll go or the more power you're producing and so normally for a steady tick over like this it gives as I say about 20 to 30 turns now you said as I said the turbine is that is on the level really how does the turbine work basically the water comes through from the back of the mill where there's a head of about five feet that causes water pressure low down underneath our feet here and so as I turn this wheel I'm lifting a sluice gate water pressure behind the sluice gate forces its way through swirls around in a huge casing and as it swirls around in the casing it's like making an artificial whirlpool and inside the middle of this whirlpool our blades and as the world of the water swirls round it pushes the blades around and that's what drives the mill we could see the power coming up through now and then as you said you start to describe the crown will opinion up there a bit like a different that's right and that's driving a shaft which goes through to the far end of the mill which in turn drives some hammer Mills through there and then the main shaft is extended further up through it disappears up through the ceiling here and there's another chrome wheel above just like a diff as you say and that drives a ley shaft which in turn drives a lot more machinery on the next floor there's a heck of a lot to throw we will go and have a quick look into many but for now I want to go back to the Cromwell itself because you told me earlier on the the teeths on the teeth the teeth on the crown wheel a made of wood Applewood that's right that so the Miller had a stress point in the machinery so that if anything jammed up one of the machines that was being driven there was no way in suddenly stopping the turbine so one finished up with one end of the machinery stopped and the other end going so it meant that something somewhere had to give a safety factor yeah that's right and so it would be these wooden teeth which would take the strain and good you should be sheared off the middle could then stop the mill sort out the machine that was giving him trouble and then knock out all the broken teeth knocking a whole set of new ones smear them with oil and probably in a couple of hours he had everything working again quite amazing the alternative of course was that if they were metal and got sheared off then it had to be a matter of contact of foundry foundry had to find a pattern make a casting send it here that wouldn't have been two hours that would have been probably two months before he had this machinery working again now we also got the flour to set and we've got a massive belt what would the belt have been made of and how do you make sure that it stays on that wheel originally the belts were made of leather but these days they are made of several layers of canvas stuck together the only way that that's kept on the wheel is by when we look at the very edge of the wheel we can see that it's very slightly bowed out and that's what holds the well that's what holds the canvas in place as it goes around one would think perhaps that it should be Hollow instead of bowed but the bow seems to keep the belt fixed in its normal position without without dropping down the mystery of physics I think I thought I think so yeah I don't quite understand it myself but as long as it works I don't mind well this is really just the start of it and we have been and had an explorer around the mill so I think we should head off and share about exactly how a mill was what it's capable of producing and how that volume of water comes in and just creates so many outlets for power yeah yes so in effect this is the engine room this is where it all starts in turning the wheel here and and opening the sluice gate everything begins to work and the hold of the machinery throughout the mill starts working yes that's the rhythm of the mill work well Peter the mills up and running B to the Millers on-site farmers just arrived what's he going to be bringing in for you to mill today well what he brings in goes through the mill twice it's usually a some type of wheat and if we're going to make flour it's nearly always a hard weight so here this is what happens when it comes into the mill we bring it in and it looks like this it has various bits of straw and husk occasionally stones and sometimes we have snail shells birds feathers sweet wrappers almost anything that might be in front of the combine harvester so it's been checked for its moisture content and it's been checked for any microorganisms which might be living in the grain which is very unlikely and then goes through the mill twice its hold to the top of the mill and drops through a machine called a widower and that takes out all the rubbish for us so that we finish up with grain which looks like this all the husk and straw has been taken out we have a few bits of husk in here but since we're making stone ground wholemeal flour a few husks don't matter because that will actually add a little bit of extra fiber to the contents of the flour that we make bit of texture bit of extra texture yeah where are we going to actually end up then so it goes through the top through to the top of the mill gravity feeds it down through a machine called a we know where as I say finishes up on the ground floor here goes back to the top of the mill again as clean grain and then comes down through the mill stones to be ground into flour and this is the flour that we make now that's wholemeal flour them so this is wholemeal flour and although it looks quite white when it's baked it will make a lightish brownlow well let's see where we start we've got a sacks come in whopping great sack but it up to the top I think I'm wait right and we use the middle of the water power to run the mill and to hoist our sacks well the sacks coming in I mean that they're no mean weight themselves and to lug them is bad enough but having us are we going to move these around the building Peter well as you say the facts are enormous this is a typical sack from the old days and it was often called a two and a quarter sack because it held two and a quarter hundred weights bringing that a little bit more up to date that was 18 stones or 114 kilos and that makes it something in the region of four and a half times what you're allowed to lift in the workplace these days so these facts were brought in from a wagon outside on the Millers back brought in here but they had to go to the top of the mill little the mill worked on the principle that you balanced the power from the water against gravity so the power from the water operated the machinery and did the lifting for you and gravity dropped everything back down again so these sacks had to go right to the top of the mill it's amazing because that the whole structure is working literally from top to bottom on gravity yes yes that's correct and so all the Miller had to do was to pull down on this cord and we get a chain and we do that so we get a loop here we have a sack the loop goes around the neck of the sack pulls up tight and then all we do is pull down on that again and away goes the sack that is absolutely amazing I can't believe and it you doing the same movement but one's long and one short I can't wait to had that works I think what we're going to do is we're going to explore this right at the top of the mill so let's move on to see as it comes down on its first trip round and we'll work our way up through the floors the thing okay we'll do it we'll do just that well Peter Curtis it's actually quite spooky up here really isn't it yes we're right up under the roof now and it is a rather cramped as you can see and these very old beams do send do tend to give us quite as you say a spooky feeling up here at that feeling of you've got a feeling up here of the real age of the mill I think the full four hundred and fifty years since it was last rebuilt amazing now the sacks also arrived is a lot easier than carrying it so it's come up on this fabulous almost Heath Robinson system to get it right to the top what don't sit next from here well we have to lower it first like so otherwise you can't take it off the chain we think we then take it off the chain and take it to the far bin to pour it into a small hopper inside the bin and that leads on down into the winner I'll let you do that Peter because I'm standing square where I am and not budging it's quite you get a bit of vertigo up here to be honest now PC was saying a little bit earlier on that the the bins Mele got that done descending and the bins individual not just to spread the weight but there's a very good reason for that to wasn't there to do with each individual persons grain that's right a farmer was very proud of the fact that he had harvested his grain at just the right moment so he wanted his grain kept separate from any other farmers that meant that the Miller couldn't just throw everything in together and of course there were different types of grain and so on bringing into the mill so there was quite a difficult job for the Miller to keep all the different types of grain separated and all the different different farmers types of grain separated must have been a bit like spinning plates really I think so yes but each farmer of course has his own pride in his own grain and so farmers brought their grain in and it was weighed in and the the output whether it was animal food or whether it was flour was weighed out again and so the farmer wanted his own grain back in the form of food or or flour and so the Miller had to keep everything separate here as you can imagine if you were a farmer and you brought your grain in you didn't want it mixed up with my old rubbish from up the road and and I was a farmer who felt that having waited another couple of weeks before I harvested it mine was in better condition than yours so I didn't want it mixed in with your old rubbish so you know there's all that weighed down on the Miller and in order to try and work out which bin to use and how to use them and which order to use them it's getting more complex but the one thing that I do love is well we're up in the eaves here these fabulous a frames and crooks it's beautiful but this is where the secret of your sack pulley is so do you want to show us how that works it can indeed and it's very simple really so we hoist the grain up with a simple hoist at the end here it has two basic characteristics and that is that the change ram in the center will both move slightly towards the window and back from where we're standing it is also basically freewheeling so when I pull on the cord what I'm doing is lifting a heavy iron bar lever and as I pull the cord and lift the lever the lever pushes the chained drum a little bit towards the window and that frees it from a brake block as soon as it's off the brake block being freewheeling the weight of the chain will take the whole thing downstairs so a little pull and it'll start going down when I let go of the cord there's enough weight in the heavy iron bar lever to drop down and pull the chain drum back against the brake block and that jams up everything so you can't get a runaway sack crashing back down through the mill and injuring anyone that was my fit yeah the weight of those sacks you really needed that braking system I was going to say that would be my big concerns and the more we go around the smell is quite dangerous really but there are some amazing safety features in there yes there are and that is that of course is one of them that you couldn't get a runaway sack crashing back down through the mill when you pull give a longer pull on the cord what's happening is that you're simply lifting the lever higher and that pushes the whole drum a little bit further towards the window from as we're standing that brings it into contact with a constantly moving drive wheel and that drives the drum round the other way and hauls the chain back up again so if we do it slowly first of all the drum comes off the brake block and freewheeling allows the dirt chain to drop we keep pulling chunk as the wheels come together and now we've got Drive and we're pulling the sack back up again as simple as that I'd say well I said earlier on Heath Robinson it's not it's incredible and to be able to design and figure all this out in those days you know we think we're cutting out the edge technology but cracky they really did have it sussed them didn't they oh yes yeah yeah and they're behind us here is another very very simple form of safety these funny old leather hinges on the flaps which come up if I demonstrate this there's big SAP those big sacks came up through here and of course on the end of a chain by the time they got to this height they were swaying so not only did they push these up but often swaying they push the flaps beyond the upright position but the leather leather means that there is enough spring there to push the flaps back down again had they been on ordinary hinges once they got past the upright position they'd flop open this wasn't here in the old days so there's a danger of someone stepping back and going 15 feet down onto the floor below so amazing and these old pieces of leather some of them are simply some of the bits of strapping which originally drove the machinery one or two of them have got bits of stitching on them and they're almost certainly from horses harness which broke as the horses strained to pull the heavy carts back up the mill Lane a pizza the sacks come down we've got so rather we've got the sack right to the top now we've emptied it into the bins on the very top floor on the bin floor it's now coming back down to the stone floor I believe this is called and into the winnower that's right it is the stone floor and over here we have the winnower which is a wooden machine probably 1930s and green comes down into a box on the top and under the box there's a roller so as the grain goes over the roller a man in the back blows out all the very lightweight stuff which is mainly Huss and bits of dust and so on that simply gets blown straight out onto the floor then everything else drops onto the top soon from a series of sieves which go down through the Machine and the top ones have holes in to let the grain fall through so anything bigger than the grain sits on the soup works its way to the end drops down at a gap and then finishes up in the bucket on the side as the grain filters down through the machine it goes down through several sets of sieves and then eventually towards the bottom the sips have small holes in but they're also slanting so the good grain rolls off the sieves and goes out the far end of the machine and falls down through a gap in the floor down into a sack in the meantime anything smaller than that grain goes through the small hole and drop sight into the second bucket that we have over there wouldn't so it takes out both particles which are larger than the grain and any particles which is small in the grain the particles are larger than the grain are the husks and the straw and so on that we saw very easily earlier on the particles that are smaller than the grain are sometimes undersized grain we get quite a lot of that very tiny particles which are not made any good for grinding and also any seeds of things like poppies or grind Saul or anything else which has sprung up in in the crop that's really really clever that's that's literally separated all that the crud from the goods absolutely yes and then of course that's all collected downstairs brought back up through this the floor again right up into the top of the mill and it goes through the same process to go down through the mill stones so we're literally doing a snake up and down through the mill as we go yes that's right well this is where we find out what a batter hopper a horse's shoe and a damsel of all got in common feeder this is your final grinding of the grain isn't it that's right this is the real heart of a mill really their mill stones and we can see the top stone spinning around there which is all very well but we got to understand how the grain gets into it so basically over the top we have a wooden thing called a horse which holds everything together when I'm ready to mill I allow the grain to drop down through the sleeve at the back there but it comes down into a hopper the hopper has a hole in the bottom which is about two inches square and that drops grain into a thing which you can just about see wobbling about over there that's known as a shoe the shoe is not retching not much more than a couple of pieces of wood put together h2h and it's hung on strings so it's loose and that means that it can be wobbled right in the middle there's it's a black bar and that's called a damsel and that damsel has three notches on and as they spin round they rattle against the shoe and make the shoe live so as the damsel works it vibrates for shoe the shoe is set by the cord on the end so it's slightly tilted downwards the grain roast and the shoe from the hopper and it comes out of the hole that the damsel goes through and drops right down into the very very center of the stones goes through the top stone because that has a hole in the center but it can't go through the bottom stone because the spindle driving this comes up through there and the hole of the bottom stone the bed stone as it's cold is blocked by what's known as a neck box which is basically a the miller's terms of the bearing which holds everything together there and so the grain then cannot go then any further so it begins to spread out as it spreads out it gets underneath this stone once it's under the stone the weight of the stone crushes and grinds the grain down to make it into flour and the fact that the stone is spinning gives centrifugal force so that throws the grain come flour into larger and larger circles until it eventually comes out inside this big wooden ton and builds up inside there when the grain that has been ground into flour and it falls out inside the tongue it begins it builds up to about two or three inches deep and by the time it's that depth the spinning stone begins to drag it round inside the tongue and as it drags around it comes over a hole which is just below us here and that hole drops down through and finishes up in a sac at the bottom so that's where the great these so that's where the flour falls down through it's amazing it's such an intricate piece of equipment as well isn't it and yet yeah once you set this up in the morning and you get the quality of flour that you want you can walk away and leave it and you're just go on working all day long one thing I've noticed is just mafia very quickly there's a lot of belts operating all of the time so you wouldn't necessarily be using every piece of equipment but every art piece is operating whenever you switch it on you kind of can't select Canyon no that's true there are no gears or clutches to throw it out of gear in any way everything is operating all the time but all these machines are designed to work empty as well as fall so there's no real problem with that so you could be doing animal feed you could be doing flour but all the machines for all those examples the crane we could do everything all the time yes yeah and the water provides that enormous amount of torque that phenomenal amount of power transmitted through a shaft the other side of the wall here along this lay shaft which lies behind me here and then the belts attached to that drive all the machinery so it's it spreads throughout the mill and as I said when we first started this neuron it's like being inside the actual engine workings of any machine isn't it yes it is it's like having a giant Meccano set which you can actually crawl inside and and see how it works and also adjusts the works as it's going along yes there's one thing I want to do is pop down very quickly because we can see it when it comes out into its acts and says and also consider how you adjust all over to accommodate the different grains let's pop dance s again you won't have a look and see how that way yes just as a flower and the the grain and the flower get out and down the mill we're going up and down the mill constantly yes a pizza we have the head for Heights tested and certainly be Fitness tested running up dad we're almost at the final stage back down here now on the meal floor with these fabulously underside to the grinding wheels and finally the flowers going to arrive down here hopefully in a very beautiful state yes we certainly hope so yes what you can see here is that if we look up underneath here in the ceiling we'll see the huge great round stone which is the lower stone or bed stone of the tutor that are making our flower the ones that are up here are what we call peaks in other words they're peach stones from the Peak District and in derbyshire area and they seem to do quite a good job for us then but the old miller's in the old days preferred French stones and behind you against is one of our one simple example of a French burst stone over there and it's whilst the peach stones were one huge stone cut straight out of the quarries the frenchbird stones are actually made up of about twelve thirteen fourteen different pieces which had to be carefully cut fitted together and then bound around with big iron bands to make sure that they didn't fly apart when they spun I think most of us always thought it was salmon good old Granite's and things but local stone was used as well sometimes was it oh yes and I'm told if you look at skeletons from three or four hundred years ago there their side teeth are actually grown down much more than ours are and that was because local stone often wasn't terribly suitable for mill stones and so the flour had an awful lot more stone in it than it does these days but but that's where the stone goes and everything that's wears off of a millstone goes into the flour there's no way of avoiding that it's a whole new meaning to rock fun doesn't it yes yeah that's right good then we could see again for adjustments and things how do we go about it because you get different grain sizes so very quickly how do we run through the final stages to make sure you've grinded to the right size well when I'm about to start milling I let the grain start falling down between the stones the stones are usually set in this mill when they're just ticking over like this with about a centimeter between them and so I let the grain start falling between the stones then I come down here down again and turn this little wheel in here and as I turned that wheel it brings the whole spindle down and that brings the top stone down with it until it begins to grind against the lowest stone so we let the grain in first and then we drop the stone into the grain as soon as I've done that some of the some of the output of the stones will start coming down through this little sleeve here and drops down at the end so I then stick my hand underneath here see what's coming out of the sleeve I have a look at it test its quality and adjust the wheel here to make it finer if necessary and and then once I'm happy with the quality of the flower that's coming out I can just walk away and leave it and they don't just keep coming on down through all day long let's just have a quick look at the final flower then let's see what graded grains make stone ground this is stone ground whole meal flour and it's got a little bit of husk in it which is ground up to make a little bit more fiber inside the the flower here but it's good quality stuff and it's nice and fine and we pack it up put it into the bags like this and absolutely beautiful and as I say graded grains make find a flower very beautiful stuff indeed absolutely glorious but you could do all sorts of different types of grains and flowers it's quite possible although with the single set of stones that we have here we do tend to keep to this type of flower all the time so this in the old days is where all the administration was done this wasn't water powered this had to be done by hand one or two interesting things we've got an old ledger here which goes back from 1890s and amazingly they were sending out Bills of over 40 pounds in those days so that must have been an awful lot of money but this is where everything was kept and this is a particularly special old writing desk for me because in here we have my grandfather who signed himself in Harry Elkins who came here in 1894 as a lad of 14 and he worked in the mill all his life the only time he left here was to do an apprenticeship and he came back in 1904 and eventually retired from this mill in 1946 and here he's signed himself in and here it says that he came back on August 23rd 1904 so that's when he'd finished his apprenticeship and was then a fully fledged Miller so that's a rather special as far as I'm concerned we'll have to say pizza for you in the team on behalf of everybody I think in the country because these smells are so so very important and if it wasn't for people like you we would lose them unless we said right at the very starts the mills were the instruments of the day they were the factories at the start of the Industrial Revolution really weren't they they were indeed and all run by water power or alternatively wind power all for free and that is what's so crucial is that we keep that side of our social history if it wasn't for people like you we would have lost places like this many many years ago and I think that a huge thank you we're all indebted to for looking after preserving and keeping these places working and then taking the time and the trouble to explain it to us so thank you so very much Peter Lew smart and the rest of the team here at Stern mr. Newton it's an amazing job you've done thanks very much indeed and is it pleasure to have you here well we look forward to celebrating a thousand years with you next year

Channel: Step Back In Time Tv

Views: 98,830

Rating: 4.8739963 out of 5

Keywords: sbit, giles warham, clare hooper, diana tigwell, stepbackintimetv, sturminster, newton, water mill, water, mill, 1000, year, flour, milling, dorset, peter loosmore, peter, loosmore, bread

Id: daH3Jf4QUMM

Length: 37min 50sec (2270 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2016