This weekend sees the beginning of the Six Nations, so whether you’re planning on following the games or doing everything you can to avoid them, this week’s blog should be able to give you some interesting roller milling facts about each of the six nations, to either whet your appetite for the weekend games, or…
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Treasures hidden in binbags
To celebrate #GivingTuesday, each week we will highlight a collection available for adoption. This week we are featuring the Armfield Drawings Collection. Yellowing, torn and crumpled, this collection comprises hundreds of attractive drawings of milling machinery. Created by the millwrighting and engineering firm Armfield between the 1870s-1920s, these documents provide valuable information about the construction…
John Silman RIP
Author: Sheila Viner Well known to many hundreds of mill and industrial history enthusiasts in Britain and the Continent, John Silman died last week. He was a founder member of the Hampshire Mills Group and was at the forefront of mill related research and restoration, serving on the S.P.A.B. Mills Section Committee and a keen…
Meg O’ The Mill
It was Burns Night last night, so it seemed appropriate to start this week’s blog with a poem by Robert Burns himself: O ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten? An’ ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten? She gotten a coof wi’ a claute o’ siller, And broken the heart o’ the barley Miller!The Miller was strappin, the Miller was ruddy, A heart like…
Building windmills on top of watermills: The Derek Ogden Collection
To celebrate #GivingTuesday, we are highlighting a collection available for adoption. Today’s collection is the Derek Ogden Collection. A millwright for many years, Derek repaired mills throughout the UK until he moved to the USA in 1974, continuing his mill work across the pond. His life’s work is documented in detail in the notes, photographs…
Unusual places to find a mill
If asked to picture a mill where roller machinery has been installed, I imagine most people would think either of a large industrial building, or a smaller traditional country mill converted to the roller process. The new ‘Building a Mill’ section on the website covers the process that a potential miller may have gone through…
Is there a hole in the Domesday Book?
A recent provocative paper entitled “Why are so few Domesday mills recorded in Devon and Cornwall? A new Thesis” suggests that the Survey did not pay sufficient attention to tide mills.The omission is particularly obvious in Devon and Cornwall but raises the issue that tide mills tended to ignored elsewhere in the country. Do you…
The treasure trove that is our Antiquarian Book Collection
To celebrate #GivingTuesday, each week we are highlighting a collection available for adoption. Today’s collection is the Antiquarian Book Collection. You may not have known of it, but here at the Mills Archive we have a large library full of all sorts of mill-related books, covering more subjects than you could imagine. These books come…
Detective work from the UK to New Zealand
This week has seen me draw from one resource that the Archive houses in large numbers for our roller mill history project: namely postcards. A search for ‘postcard’ in the online catalogue returns with 6304 results, and there are more that have not yet been catalogued. These items provide a wealth of information and can…
Rescue of one of the most important millwright collections
To celebrate #GivingTuesday, each week we will highlight a collection available for adoption. Collection adopters help secure the safety and availability of all the Archive’s images and documents for generations to come. Today’s highlighted collection is the Vincent Pargeter Collection. One of the most admired millwrights in recent years, Vincent’s sudden death shocked the mills…