The Domesday Mill (Dotton, Devon) | Series 14 Episode 9 | Time Team

this is otterson mill in devon and in here is one of the earliest industrial processes this water turns this wheel which turns this thing here which turns a big millstone in there to turn this into one of these everybody needed bread so there used to be thousands of mills all over the country this is dotton it's a couple of miles from otterton there used to be a mill here but it was knocked down in the 1960s the first record of a mill on this site though is in doomsday in 1086 we've never dug a mill before so this site gives us a unique opportunity to look into part of what would have been everyday life for tens of thousands of people we've got 900 years of history and just three days to untangle it [Music] what is it that you find so exciting about mills i think they're really interesting structures and we don't know much about them after all there must have been many thousands of them in medieval england and almost every community would have had one because it made grinding the corn preparing the bread and everything that much easier and yet we we've done very very little work on them why not if they're that exciting i think it's because of the way archaeologists work you know they're either working with sites that have been going to be redeveloped and they don't often seem to involve mills or they're too small really to be part of big research projects that might get the money which archaeologists then spend three or four years digging so they fall between all those stalls and that's why this is so important it's not very often you can be fairly confident you've got a site and you've got the chance to actually do anything with it i mean i think the way to think of it is you you were grinding corn by hand with stones this is pretty well the first process where you harness a different sort of energy water power to to alleviate all that work so it's an industrial revolution in in in one sense this was the last mill building in dotton it was knocked down in the 1960s we're looking for a date for when this building was put up and any sign of anything that may have come before it there was a mill listed as being in dotton in doomsday in 1086 but the big question is has the mill always been in the same place there are three main areas that hopefully will provide some answers in the form of dates the water wheel would have sat in a deep pit we'll look at how that was built inside was a gear pit to hold the gearing we'll also try to find that and there would have been a domestic area the part the miller would have lived in hopefully we'll come across bits of pottery and household stuff that'll also help us with the dating the mill sits here on a road crossing the river otter in south devon right photo bank banks over there banks there but first phil has got to work out where to dig should we help you no no no look presumably we're on the wheel pit don't we uh yeah we'll put there but this this photograph was taken from that field over there looking looking this way ah you got it so this building has actually been mapped for a hundred nod years its physical presence is is well documented and where we're standing at the moment is just here this is the mill the mill was in this area here it's coming down here and at the bottom of it is the wheel somewhere in this position at the end of this leak that brings down here that's what we want in it martin yeah the wheel pit i think the wheel pit would be the the best feature to go for straight away because it'll be a big feature under the ground and we'll delineate the the sort of at the end of the building well let me show you that's why we should start doing the right start the radar here we don't need it no you do you might you may have good map evidence we all know what stewart's maps are like but no more importantly phil it's the first time we've done a mill we've not done geophysics or radar over a mill it's important that we collect that data as a future reference john we're not here for your groundbreaking geophysics we're here to do a site it's going to be the way it should be done professionally look we know where it is it will take us five minutes to do it over here stuart yeah start here jimmy true to his word within minutes john's got something for phil to look at that's where we reckon the wheel pit is then you see all these reflections going down those are actually within the mill building and this is still inside the building but suggesting we've got internal divisions so you can start i mean that's been worth doing it oh yeah well that's it and and it didn't take any more than five minutes happy now phil makes a start one more scrape and you think you might see a wall and nothing happens one more well one more scrape later ah now watch that that's in situ isn't it phil that is so that's one side there this is dotton here's the river otter this is the road that crosses the river and the mill where phil is is here just here waters diverted from the river to the mill along a channel called elite the lead enabled the miller to control the flow of water to the mill in the field across the road from the mill site we can see remnants of where the leak might be along the base of the slope how big was it how powerful and can we find a date for when it was dug helen opens a trench across it the mill building is really two buildings in one there's the industrial part of it where the machinery would have been and then there's the domestic side where the miller lived using radar john and his team have been trying to locate that end of the building they think they've found it so we open a trench just across here [Music] naomi's hoping to find more personal stuff here pottery and domestic material which will give us some dates all morning we've been busy looking for the wheel pit but what might it have looked like what a cracking little graphic i mean presumably this is actually telling me how my water wheel works it is phil there's four different types i mean how do they they differ in terms of design and efficiency it's all about where the water is hitting the paddles so uh with with the overshot and the breasts shot the water's hitting the paddles high up the wheel with the undershot of the low breath shot it's lower down the one we've got is an undershot wheel how does that work in terms of efficiency it's it's the least efficient of the wheels we've got here sorry i get a duff mill don't i yeah as well not really this is this is an older type of technology for a water wheel i noticed that here you've got this sort of little mini weir effect right underneath the wheel yeah it's actually in the wheel pit itself what that is doing is it's creating a little dam of water which gives you an added uh power to the water wheel so as the water is coming down the leak it just gets to that edge and it tips over and it spins up the way so although it's inefficient it's not as inefficient as it might be what are you doing what i'm doing is cutting the grass to be plainly obvious yeah sure yeah what we've got here tony you see on this slope down here yeah there are what caught patch marks you can see these light coloured lines on the slope yeah well these parchments are where there might be buried walls under the ground it's slightly dry across this stone so they they start to stand out but this area has got longer grass in it so i'm just simply cutting it so we can see it better and the idea is that henry is going to map this out with this pole and we might might have a footprint of some buildings here so this is going to be useful oh it is going to be it's good fun as well i'm going to go off elsewhere see how long it takes before i can get that engine started again ye of little faith this is where stuart's cutting the grass just off to one side of the mill site the lead is here the patch marks seem to be across all of this area we leave him to it mills were really a very early device for saving labor harnessing water power was a huge step forward as i was to discover prior to the water wheel this is how grinding corn was done by hand some wait to move about isn't it it's fairly hard work and to think from the records that we have most of the time it was done by women how much do you think's there there's a couple of pounds of wheat there that's going to make a nice little loaf and how long would it take to grind it at that speed about an hour it's one of those jobs that actually isn't too bad when you start but i've been doing a few minutes it really pulls in your back and that hurts come out a bit now i'm sort of a funny angle really matt could you give me a hand could you just hold that oh yeah sure isn't it yeah i kept the call in there about half an hour man in phil's trench we're coming across lots of bricks and there's also a lot of metal work that phil doesn't recognize tomorrow we've got another of these pieces wow that's good phil that's um that's some reinforcing i think from the water wheel where one of the uh one of the arms one of the spokes joined the rim of the wheel and uh it was all bolted together yeah i mean look we've actually got the wood preserved sort of just stuck against the iron there and right the way through here this is all just wood as well we're getting so many of these but the other thing we're getting are these things here what are they well again that looks like a reinforcing plate you see it's got a curve to it yeah we've been looking at that which i should think is the outside diameter of the water wheel and is holding together the wooden rims that come round to make the a ring a continuous ring and this is where they're joined together they're bolted together with these iron plates sure we have actually got the water wheel we've got we've got some very good bits of the water wheel perhaps more than you would expect to survive we got a lot of the the iron work that held it together and we could get the size of some of the components from these as well the pieces in phil's trench give us an indication of the size of the wheel they fit together like this it's a big wheel about three meters across probably dating from the victorian period earlier on today helen put in a little trench over here to see if she could find the leet which is the stream that they use for driving the water wheel how did you get on oh well we've done brilliantly we've we've got we've got almost all of it let me show you what was it like digging this stuff not bad it's generally soft with a few hard lumps but the particularly easy bit was when ian was digging it with the mechanical digger i'm afraid this is the clearest bit this is um the lenses of little layers puff pastry layers of gray and yellow which have come from where the water was this is the actual elite here and then along here again incredibly obvious these red stones are kind of stone lining um to to the elite itself so we've got the whole of this side the only thing we haven't got is the other side it should be exactly the same on the other side but it's underneath that great hill so do we know what date this wall is well well if it's a stone wall mick i think that means it's going to be before the 18th century late medieval 16th century as early as that yeah well the reason is if it was 18th or 19th century it would be a nicely dressed stone wall or it more likely would be a brick wall and it's not you think it's like medieval lake medieval yeah helen this is you late medieval it's brilliant isn't it is exactly what we wanted end of day one and we're halfway to doomsday the lead looked like this it was quite shallow and wide about two meters across it had two edges made of stone these edges place it in the medieval period we've got the lead the work of this trench is now done so we can now say it goes across here to phil's trench where it should join the wheel pit if we have that phil you got anything in your trench of course i have got the wheel pit this is the wheel pit a lot of that's actually filled in but we have got to the bottom of the wheel pit and look look at this this brick wall is actually made out of recent bricks they're frogged look there's the imprint of the frogs yeah but what we have got is the pivot point for the wheel so the actual wheel would have pivoted on that point there i mean that is really good because it will give us an opportunity to reconstruct just how big this thing was so this this whole thing here that is all the wheel pins there is the wheel pit there's a hell of a size wheel isn't it well that's right but you see what we want to do is if we can get over there yeah that wall is a totally different build to this i reckon that was a lot earlier what we've got to do is get over there and have a look at it just in front of you there is a parchment there with the grass now shorter stewart's got a better view of the patch marks he and henry plot them out and it's beginning to make interesting viewing a rather good day i think we've got the mill over there we've got the elite over there yeah and we've got some intriguing patch marks over here are those patch marks working out all right for you well they are because they seem to match up with an 1842 tithe map that we've got that shows buildings on this slope over here so they're sitting above the the leaked here so yeah i think we've got buildings on there and the geophysics gives us a really good plan of those buildings why are we getting excited about another building we've already got the mill over there well we've got a building shown here on the map that makes use of the slope of the ground the natural slope of the ground and comes down to the mill stream so are we looking at another mill another mill well in my experience it's quite usual to have the crossing point on the downstream side of the mill which would fit the bill very nicely in this case so we came for one meal maybe we've got two who knows maybe we'll even get three well that'd be good we won't know till tomorrow beginning of day two here at dotton in east devon we had a good day yesterday it was good wasn't it we got a long way with this we found the most recent phase of the mill over there and phil and naomi going to continue digging that but yesterday evening you started to develop this theory that there might be another mill up here on this slope somewhere what's the evidence for that well there is a building shown on the tithe map anyway in 1842 yeah but you see there are lots of patch marks in the grass yeah where the grass has died over the top of probably walls underneath and so we did some geophysics across here and clearly there is something going on all right there might be buildings there doesn't mean it's a mill well it's an odd place to put a house or farm buildings you imagine if we just stepped all the way up this slope it'd be very inconvenient so why would it be a good place to put a mill well let me show you on a diagram look we've got the lead at the bottom of the slope we've then got the rise up of the ground and if you build a mill across that slope like that there are certain advantages you can have the the mill wheel in the pit like that and driving the mill machinery but you can actually bring the corn in at the top level straight into the top of the building but it is still only a theory yeah it needs testing how do we test it i think what we do is we dig a trench from where the lead is at the bottom of this slope up into the crop marks where the geophysics depicts stuff if we find a wheel pit down there we'll know we're right and there was a mill but if it goes straight into buildings we'll know that it was a bad idea and there wasn't a mill here so it should be quite easy to test this new trench is just here across the elite and on the edge of a building that shows up both in the patch marks and on a 19th century map if we find a wheel pit we've got another mill if so the chances are it will be earlier than the one in phil's trench on the main site we've got two trenches going in the domestic area we've got several internal walls at one end we're going deeper down the outside of the building [Music] at the other end of the building phil's also getting a lot deeper this photograph of the mill is helping us make sense of the archaeology we are standing about here but at a higher level and you see if you look across here here's the axle with the main wheel and you can see that that is at ground level which would actually slot into that sort of indentation and the brickwork now if you carry that across then that goes into that wall there which is going to be our wall across this behind the planks on the left-hand side there that's right if you compare the level at which this wheel uh axle goes across and the level of the windows which are right up here so these are right up across here that's right so in other words that does suggest that your floor level is going to have to be down here which suggests that underneath here just as was was picked up on the geophysics there is actually an underground room if you like where the mill equipment would have been which is gonna be underneath there yeah yeah so does that sound feasible to you mike yeah i think i think that's i think that's very good nick but what i think we need to do first is we need to get into the wheel pit and pull it back further towards the road why do we need to do that well i think what we should be looking for in the wheel pit is a little rise a little kick up at the back of the bottom of the wheel what do you mean well um we're looking for a mini down perhaps a foot two feet high which would increase the headwater and the efficiency of the water so that as the water comes in it's a little bit higher than the bottom of the yeah in fact now if we can find that that'll give us not only what kind of wheel we've got in detail but also i think it'll help us a bit about the date so what what date would that sort of structure well it ought to be any earlier than the 16th century right just a couple of miles away is otterton mill it's still a working mill grinding corn once a week it's interesting it shows me just how much this process changed people's lives martin said he reckoned it would take us about half an hour to grind this little lot up by hand in fact matt did it and it took him two hours how long directly would have taken at a water mill a couple of minutes in a mill like this how does it work well the water wheel's mounted on a central shaft or axle which goes through the wall into the mill and that takes the power right through into the part where you need it to drive the millstone here yeah oh yeah i can see the shaft coming through there yes that's right tony and the main gear turning in a pit at the bottom and that's the feature that we're looking for in the millet dot so the gear going that way then transfers into this one and the power goes up there that's right and this is driving the millstones which are on the floor above so the power comes up through to here yes it does it's turning the top millstone that's turned from below and then you can see the hopper over the millstones where the grain is being fed by gravity down into a hole through the top millstone and what happens to the coil once it's ground well it comes out inside the case and then there's only one place for it to go and that's down the spout to the floor below so we have to go back down again we do indeed yeah you keep fit in the milk oh and here's the finished product coming down the chute yeah how long do you think it would take to fill up that sack apparently it takes about a quarter of an hour it's beautiful isn't it back on site our search for what might be an earlier mill isn't going well helen and bridge have found very little really there are some pieces of pot but it all looks like a rubbish dump to them even that though isn't simple it'd be nice to know if we're looking at an area where there is possibly earlier material floating about rather than this being the early features yeah i'd like to know if this is a primary rubbish dump or somebody's just clearing an another rubbish dump into a in a secondary way into something else if there is an earlier mill in this field it has to be against the edge of the elite so we do fizz along the lead to see if we can pick up any structures just to check it out [Music] in his trench phil's got another wall is that it i think it might be fun good yeah oh brilliant stoner crows that's following the the shape of the water wheel oh we've done it yeah there's a wall there's a great wall there it's special that's the the where it comes in at a higher level comes in at a higher level i i either either at the top or sort of halfway down the wheel well you was vindicated strip that back a little bit you said you want to see i did you said it was critical i did and it and it is this wall is the same height as the wall to the side which means that mike's original thought was wrong this isn't an undershot wheel like this it's a breastshot one like this a much more efficient system [Music] off to one side of the wheel pit we've come across a large piece of stone phil and i have a look at it where should the middle be there somewhere we're practically out for the cameraman's waist in debris it is curving it's definitely curving all the way around isn't it there's no hole in the middle ah what's that is that something in the middle a hole a hole in the middle what is round in a mill with a hole in the middle a polo [Laughter] oh you mean this whole thing is the hole so it's been blocked up wow i mean that's hollow it's a puzzle it might say i i wonder if we should be taking the machine to clear the top off here so so we can get a really good look phil i think you're actually probably right in the domestic part of the building we've been looking for household items that might give us some dates and sure enough we've got a collection of them so this is the stuff from this trench here right and really we want your opinion on the dates john if you can this for instance staffordshire pottery of the early 19th century all this these white earthenwares right there's another example there so that's all going with the life of the mill in the 19th century and these this is uh very probably from bridgewater these red earth and we're told you know from your summerslam days so we've got a little pile of things developing here these run right through the 18th century could well be earlier than that but as we get down this end of the tray there are earlier things this is a trail slip where the first half of the 18th century this last piece i ended up with it now it's a cut edge isn't it it's a bit of modern glass though it's not it that actually is window early window glass and this um is from a diamond pain 17 probably beginning of the 18th century but it's actually isn't it nice what about that piece that piece came from much lower down in that yeah that's good because this this is earlier leg laced earthenwares of the late 16th and early 17th century and the typical thing about them is they look dull at this sort of period most of the pottery is unornamented but it's back as far as sixteen hundreds so there's indications that we might have stuff on the site back as far as that that's right yeah that's good great the fines are also taking us back to the 1600s just like the date of the elite but the earliest mention of a mill at dotton was in here in the doomsday book it's an invaluable record of england in 1086. it lists all the land and livestock and was drawn up to enable william the conqueror to collect his dues in the form of taxes what does it say though about dotton it tells us that uh the area paid tax for one vair gate of land and three furlong i'm not even going to ask you what a gate is let's move on it's just very a very small area okay very small area and there was land for two plows with one and a half plows there how can you have half a plough they quite possibly were using half a plow of somebody else's so um borrowing and therefore added up to half a plow and a slave and a slave but also the there was the mill which paid five shillings taxed um that's right and the whole area was actually valued at seven shillings you've got dotted mill here which is worth five bob and then you've got all this land around here and that's only worth another two bob yes so the mill is actually the most valuable bit of this land unit phil now has his millstone and it's a beauty but can martin date it it looks to me so there might be four three or four grooves coming off of the central in here down here one there can we clean it up a bit and just have a look or am i making this up i think we have so that would that would be good i think we have what's a slot slot there yeah i think we have i think this is i think there's another one there oh there yeah so you've got four holes that's right coming off it which have been filled in that's really brilliant yes there is so it is a top stone and the curving shape of those oh that's excellent phil the curving shape of those certainly uh pushes the date of this back i mean this is a 17th 18th century millstone i would say that that fits in with some of the pottery we've been looking at surely look at that isn't that a strange shape the key is this bit in the middle the shape of this dates the stone as 17th century the dates are all beginning to tie together we now have the floor of the domestic part of the mill building it too is a beauty this was probably the kitchen floor we decided to lift a section of it to see if we can see signs of any earlier flooring across the road in the other field helen and bridge are drawing a blank they've found the continuation of the elite this wall is one edge of it but there's no sign of a wheel pit and the building doesn't seem to be attached to the elite it's not looking like an earlier mill and dating is a problem it's either before during or after but we don't know which yet yesterday had the devil's own job getting anywhere near this wall didn't you but now you've cleaned it up and it's looking great i'm really glad i did too i mean when i got here i mean the first thing i noticed was that these bricks here are actually frogged and i was a bit despondent about it because they're exactly the same day and age as that wall on the other side but then as i went down i realized that it actually zigzags its way down in a sort of v-shaped and it kind of wiggles its way up round through here and then levels off across there and i realized it was just one big botched repair job and the underneath all this is good stone masonry and that stone-built work i think is the earliest stuff and in fact it goes behind and therefore it's got to be earlier than that brick work there what'd you write martin yeah i think that's absolutely right phil i think this is where the water and the action of the water wheel has eroded the wall the stone of the wall and it's been patched with brickwork so what do you think about that older bit what kind of date well from the other evidence we've had i guess 17th 18th century well that's great that takes the story of the mill back about 350 years isn't it well it does but i think we've got the possibility of taking it back even more than that how well if we can have a look underneath the floor of this wheel pit there may be some evidence under there of earlier structures because this elite and this watercourse has been in use for a long time you see down here i've already had a bit of a poke around this hole here is actually been made by the wheel and look you can actually see look oh wow oh it's a big piece of wood that is interesting isn't it hmm can you expect that well that gives them something to chase tomorrow doesn't it does indeed [Music] it's day three in our search for an early mill in dotton in devon at the end of yesterday phil found an intriguing piece of wood oh wow that is interesting isn't it hmm can you expect that but what is this this is a piece of the water wheel it's the rim how do you know that well look you've got a really nice curve there and we've got a lump of wood here which which i think is part of the base of the petal and what are these lumpy bits well we we've got bits of pins for holding the paddles in place but do you know that the water will would have looked like that i do because we've got this really nice late 19th century photograph that's cheating which shows us the rim of the water wheel so this actually is part of that that wheel is a fragment there late 19th century late 19th century judging by the guy with the flat cap late 19th century doesn't sound much really but actually it's 150 years ago virtually isn't it in his trench phil started digging but there's a problem there's more wood but there also seems to be concrete this is confusing mike because there's there's actually a piece of timber this timber is coming right in underneath there underneath the concrete underneath the concrete and yet it's it's occupying this trough in the concrete and it looks for all the world so we've got concrete i'm not sure whether i haven't got concrete right the way down there could it like be stone at the bottom field rather than concrete an earlier lining of the of the wheel pit well it might be because if you've got wood underneath the concrete that might mean we've got an earlier structure to the wheel fit yeah but but but then you see if this concrete is laid directly on it it might actually be stuck onto it well i reckon that concrete is going to have to come up one way or the other at the other end of the mill building we've already gone through the floor of the domestic area but there's nothing dateable and no other features this trench did give us some internal walls we begin to plot them out to see if we can understand how this building worked on the inside the last mill on this site was knocked down only 30 years ago so there are quite a few people still around who remember it they saw it at work i can remember it you know the old mill with the flower all the farmers the tenant farmers brought their corn there reg can remember the milk working yeah when i worked on the farm what the the farmer he set the ground milk during the war for a farmer i remember coming over to the mill with my grandfather in his pony and trap and bringing corn and fetching a flower and stuff like that what was the middle well he he was a little short chat and he was always covered in white flowers he really was a dusty miller yeah yeah he was you've done your family research right that's right and this lady's family worked in the mill in the 1840s my great great great grandfather he was miller here for 50 years his name was joel roger carter this is his daughter his middle daughter anna and she's my great great grandmother she was born at dotton mill joel carter the miller he was quite a musician he played cornet that he used to go up on the hills above the mill to play and they could hear the music all across the valley [Music] for a couple of days stuart's been looking at likely places for other mills across the whole site it's becoming increasingly clear that there's only really one place the mill could have been what you need to be able to do is manage the flow of water very very carefully and what they've done here at dotted is to manage the river in a very specific way by building a weir across the river here which then allows the water to flow down elite in a ditch they dig a ditch down here the water flows down it turns the mill wheel and then the water just flows back into the river down here one thing to to point out is the road which i think has got forgotten in all the the search that we've got when you say the road that's our little country lane that's it it's absolutely critical to the sighting it's the only crossing of this valley in the parish what you need with a mill is not only the water to turn the wheel but you also need to deliver the corn to to grind and you need to take the flour away so the conditions are absolutely perfect for the mill just at that point so does that mean that where dot and mill is now is the prime site for a mill and no one would have built one anywhere else i think that's exactly the case i firmly believe that under the mill that phil's digging will be evidence of the earliest meal on the site it's in exactly the position it ought to be to be efficient in the field across the lane helen's search for an earlier mill has come to an end she was looking for signs of a wheel pit but there isn't one she's now found most of the elite running from phil's trench across the field she's been working in but there's no sign of any building that might be a mill and no sign of any structure other than what was probably a house we've opened two holes in it looking for an earlier meal on this site and i think what we have shown is that there's no we haven't found a mill and there's no need for a meal in this field everything connected with the elite is going over to that one well that's really important isn't it because up until now we've had circumstantial evidence that there's only been one site for a mill here because that's the best site that there could possibly be now the archaeology is confirming it absolutely it certainly is here yes this is all leaked connected with that mill in fact the lead turns out to be the key to dating the site of the earliest mill analyzing the various maps we realize that the key map is that of the parish this is the parish boundary on this side the parish boundary is the lead as the leak's man-made and doesn't follow any natural feature this means that the elite must have been here when the parish boundary was laid out and that pushes it and the mill right into the 10th or 11th century before doomsday back at the main site just off to the side of where phil's digging we've found a second millstone but the quality of this stone is very poor it's such rubbish stone isn't it well it is when you think we're in a county with dartmoor granite with ports that you can bring stone in from the french basin forest of dean's not far away what are they doing using rubbish like that it's a new red sandstone sort of conglomerate type yeah and it's very unusual in fact it's the first one i've ever seen in having but they would have had grit in their grain wouldn't they sort of use that well they would but i i suspect it was used at least laterally for grinding animal feed with so it wouldn't have mattered quite so much or maybe coarse grinding of some sort but i think the other thing is it tells us a bit more of the story that this wasn't a particularly prosperous mill natalie that they weren't buying good quality millstones in so that's in great contrast to the the five shilling at doomsday which was it was a lot of money well it is indeed isn't it yes it shows how over a period of a thousand years the life of a mill can change yeah yes [Music] phil's trying to analyze what's going on with the layers he's finding in his trench he's not quite there yet i was beginning to think that we maybe had sequences of gravel with bits of wood stratified within them because this timber here overlays this gravel yeah but this gravel here overlays this big piece of timber in there yeah and i began to wonder whether or not we might just have a sort of sequence of of layers and deposits with timber and then the timber rots away and more gravel comes in and they replace it and the whole thing gradually builds up yeah but i think all we can say at the moment is that certainly in this gravel there are archaeological deposits at the moment there only looks like the only sort of victorian 18th 19th century but i think mainly there is the potential for earlier stuff further on down i think we just got to go for it and see where we can find something yeah i agree we have the wheel pit but we also have this other pit called the pit wheel this held the gearing to turn the millstones we do have rather a deep hole where the pitch should be stoner crows if this is the pit wheel then it is going to be a deep slot almost as well it has to be almost as deep as the water wheel that is a hell of a hole down there in it hey and there's also this big metal lump here do you want to see if we can get this out i think we should go for it yeah [Music] well it looks like the pit wheel or part of the pit wheel what what's this bit this is the rim of the gear right where the where the wooden cogs were mortised in this would be the working face have it upright so vertical mounting yes yes vertical gear and these mortises are for the wooden cogs that uh it were in the face of the gear to mesh with the the rest of the gearing in the mill so why are using wooden cogs well this was a fairly large diameter gear and in the early days they couldn't cast to good tolerances and two cast iron gears running together would have been very noisy and put a lot of stress on each other so the larger gears were often made with mortises cast in them to put wooden cogs in which were all paired and prepared by hand and it made for much quieter and safer running the cog in the center is the piece of gear we've now found this linked the water wheel to the millstones it was a key part of the mill equipment we've now plotted the internal walls of the building and have a good idea of how the inside of the last mill building on the site worked it's a lovely looking mill you've got it's terrific isn't it we've got this wonderful exterior water wheel and all the power that's going out going on there is coming into the this end of the mill well we've got all the mill machinery with up there on the first floor the millstones grinding away and then over there at that end we've got the domestic building have a look inside why don't we go on then so that big wall over there tony that's our gable end wall behind which we've got our water wheel and then this halfway you can see in front of it that's our pit wheel that's bringing all the power in to this machinery here up into the big wallower wheel in the ceiling and above us we've got the grinding stones the milstein's working away that's the noise we can hear and then small window storage beneath it and big window lots of pains and the miller's desk beneath that so it keeps all the records you know make sure everybody pays the right tithe right time of year and it's actually sitting on a millstone in the floor oh nice warming here yeah it's a lot better isn't it tony um that's because this is the heart of the house so we've got um over there we've got we've got the table down table with the with the bench in front of it and we've got the the big dresser there with the with all the sort of pewter and earthenware cups and bowls and stuff but the real heart of the room and the house is the range over there yeah yeah big copper kettle water boiling all the time and then and then above it we've got pots and pans and all sorts of stuff and this is the heart of the house it's really cosy it is isn't it the last building on this site seems to have been put up in the 18th century our earlier walls and the middle stones date from the late 17th century but the fines take us further back to the early 1600s the wheel pit has early bricks and even earlier stone at the base and right at the end of day three phil's come up with the goods once again this piece of timber that starts there yeah well i managed to trace it along and actually i got it still going right through to there in other words it's going underneath the wall so that piece of timber has either got to be earlier than that wall or at the very least the same date as a foundation timber exactly yes the timber in this trench suggests a much earlier phase for the wheel pit than we'd thought everything says 17th century but i also think that we've probably got stuff earlier because the bottom of that that leaked is incredibly well worn it's incredibly full of gravel and right down there i mean we've we've got timber in that goes underneath the the floor i think we're looking at a medieval material questionably i think you see the topographical situation of the place argues that it's earlier even the structural stuff because this mill lead that runs right the way through is the parish boundary that's likely been fixed in the 10th or 11th century dotton's on this side of that there's a very limited area perhaps about 50 meters on the side of it could put a mill we've tested it with three or four trenches this is the most likely place for that so you know it's not just that it's 400 years old 500 years old it's likely to have been here for a thousand when this building was demolished in the 1960s it wasn't just the end for a building that was a couple of hundred years old it was the end of almost a thousand years of milling on this very spot to ensure you catch all the latest updates please do subscribe to this channel follow us on social media and sign up to our newsletter and join us on patreon

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 197,936

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, the domesday mill, time team, time team devon, dotton, devon, water mill, mill, british history, time team water mill, time team season 14 episode 9, time team full episodes

Id: -sfy7rGABKM

Length: 47min 44sec (2864 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021