The last Melin Bompren Miller Hettie Jones at the time of retirement in 1957. Image used by permission of Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. The county of Ceredigion, corresponding largely with that of Cardiganshire in Wales, is considered a centre of Welsh culture and nearly 50% of the inhabitants speak Welsh. It is largely rural…
Author: Nathanael Hodge
An ancient milling revolution
Nathanael Hodge Happy New Year to all readers of our newsletter! 2023 is the Mills Archive’s 21st birthday, and in honour of this we will be featuring a series of 21 gems from our collections in these newsletters in the coming months.Our first gem is a beehive quern dating back to the Iron Age, from…
Roller flour mill collections
At the Mills Archive we have a wide range of interests covering a variety of subjects connected to mills and milling. Much of our collections relates to traditional wind and water powered mills and these have often been featured in this newsletter. However, we are equally interested in capturing the more recent history of flour…
A typical country miller
A few weeks ago, we featured some of the writing of John Munnings (1916-1987) with his memories about growing up at Mendham Mill, Suffolk, where his father was the miller. This newsletter gives Munnings’ account of his grandfather, also called John Munnings and miller at Mendham Mill. John Munnings (1839-1914) Unfortunately, my grandfather died a…
Using our Mills Database
The database of mills on our website contains more than 12,000 entries, and can be searched in a variety of ways. Read on to find out more.Searching the databaseYou can search the database here: https://new.millsarchive.org/mills/. The easiest way is to put the name of the mill you are looking for in the search bar at the top of…
Holman Bros, millwrights of Canterbury
In the last few months this newsletter has featured several articles about the Montefiore Windmill in Jerusalem, which was built by the firm Holman Brothers of Canterbury. This newsletter delves deeper into the history of the firm. Holman Brothers was a Canterbury firm founded in 1816 by John Holman. Originally millwrights, they built smock mills…
Using our Images and Documents catalogue
One of the main ways we provide access to our archives is through our images and documents catalogue, which you can access here: https://catalogue.millsarchive.org/In this newsletter we have put together some guidance about what the site contains and how you can use it. What does the catalogue include? In our archival collections we hold a wide…
‘Mill people’ images and Website survey
‘Mill people’ images Mills have often been a popular theme for artworks, ranging from realistic depictions to some of the more unusual symbolic and allegorical uses of milling imagery. There are not many mill images however which are as strange as the ones shown here. For want of a better term we could call them…
Satanic mills
William Blake Opinions are divided on the question of what the poet William Blake was talking about when he referred to the ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ that plague ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ in his famous poem, best known as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’. It is often seen as a reference to the Industrial Revolution, and some…
Time, the old miller
The mill as a metaphor for time and change is an ancient theme. St Augustine of Hippo (354-430) in his ‘Expositions on the Psalms’ described the world as a mill, because of the way the wheel of time is ever revolving and in the end crushes everyone. The ancient Greek proverb dating back to at…