Tucked away on an old estate is this adorable old corn mill. It's fairly dilapidated, and to call it a death trap would be an understatement. I'd trust the McCanns to babysit more than I'd trust the floorboards to hold my weight.
But, I famously lack a survival instinct so I'm going in anyway.
Historians generally agree that the mill dates back to the early 1800s or possibly late 1700s. To substantiate this, an advert for the land from 1806 mentions a strong stream of water running through the premises that "may be used for various purposes."
Someone evidently saw that ad and thought "corn mill." I saw it and thought "skinny dipping." This is why I'm not rich.
It's said that another mill may have stood here earlier than that, and this one certainly seems to have undergone modifications over the years, as evidenced by it being half brick and half limestone. And if we look very closely at the wall behind the water wheel, we can see that it's obstructing a bricked up doorway.
The wheel is about seventeen feet in diameter and as we can see, it's supplied with water via a pipe and a tank.
Water still falls but the wheel has long stopped spinning.
The mill is on the land of an old farm. The farm house is still occupied, and deliciously historic, dating all the way back to 1651 when it was built for the Sheriff of Denbigh, William Wynn. I've not actually mentioned the Wynn family on this blog before, which is susprising because it's fairly humungous. When it comes to these rich families, I've spoken about the Harlechs, the Mostyns, and the Bulkeleys, and I've found that they're all distantly related to each other and to various other notable historic figures. It wouldn't surprise me if the Wynn's are in that genealogical rubix cube too. It's less of a family tree, more of a family bush.
But on the subject of notable historic figures, this land was also allegedly once the stronghold of the Welsh Prince Cynan, whose father was king of Gwynedd in 1023. That's pretty cool if it's true.
Here on the mill's brick side, we can see the contrast a little better. The mill literally is half brick and half limestone. There is a very obvious line right down the middle.
Let's slip inside!
Researching the mill was a bit of a headache. Nobody seems to know much about it. Even old people just know it as the derelict mill, because that's all it's ever been to them.
But I did find a flicker of hope in a document that makes mention of a woman called Elinor whose grandfather Robert Jones was a miller on this estate.
But this wasn't the best intel in the world. I'm basically trying to map out the life of a guy who has the John Smith of Welsh names. There's probably twenty of them in a 10km radius of the estate.
Nevertheless, I persevered.
Robert Jones was born in 1812, and he married a woman named Eleanor (a name that pops up throughout the family tree), and had a small horde of crotchfruit, starting with Jane in 1834, Sarah in 1835 and Robert in 1840. It seems that Eleanor died pretty young, in 1847 at the age of 42. Census data shows that the family lived together in 1841 and 1851, with Robert listed as a miller. Another document from 1839 clarifies that Robert worked at this specific mill.
His kids would soon vacate the nest. Robert Jr would leave to become a colliery worker, and Sarah would leave to marry one, a chap named Jesse. I can't find any photos of Sarah, or her father, but I have found photos of Jesse.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
But he won't pop up again. I just like showing these old photos. They really bring the story to life. It's one thing to see a name on a screen but another thing entirely to put a face to the name, and an expression on that face, and think that once upon a time this was a real person, with a pulse and everything, who you could have a real conversation with.
Check it out! The mill still has loads of old machinery. This is pretty incredible given how long the place has been derelict. I wonder if it could be restored and made functional.
I *think* that red bowl thing is an old fertiliser sower. Behind it on the wall is some sort of chute. I've never worked in a Victorian-era corn mill so I don't know exactly how it works, but I guess it would be some gravity-assisted grinding bonanza. In which case, these chutes would carry the corn down into containers once it had been grinded. These wall-mounted chutes are prevalent around the mill.
There's a brick fireplace over in the corner. Some see this as an indication that the mill was once modified for residential purposes, which is quite intriguing. I don't think Robert Jones lived here, because a "millers house" also existed on the estate around the time that he worked here.
But after his death in 1878, his daughter Jane seems to have stuck around.
And I have a photo of a "Jane Jones" from the area who I *think* might be her.
It's not her existence that I'm unsure of, but more whether or not this image is the Jane Jones we're looking for. As with her father Robert, "Jane Jones" isn't the easiest name to research in Victorian rural Wales.
But the woman pictured was called Jane Jones, and she did live in the area, and from what I can tell, this image does have some resemblance to a woman I know to be the daughter of the Jane Jones I'm trying to research.
Jane married a chap named John Rogers, and they went on to make a small horde of semen demons, Mary Anne in 1859, Thomas in 1863, Elizabeth in 1868, Gomer in 1870, Edward in 1878 and Elinor in 1880.
This Elinor is the same Elinor that led me down this rabbit hole to begin with, the famous granddaughter of Robert. She often went by Ellen, which I found quite curious. It does make sense that Ellen would be short for Elinor, but I've never actually come across it before. They tend to be their own separate thing.
Jane and her husband John are first mentioned as millers on the 1871 census, but the 1881 census specifically says that they lived here in this mill. They must have taken it over after Robert passed away, and then decided to move in. And that's rather mind-blowing because this mill is pretty cramped. Living here with six children can't have been comfortable. But this sort of thing was all the rage in the Victorian era. It's a reflection of the poverty of the time. Whole families just crammed into one bedroom, and that was just the way things were.
The 1881 census mentions Mary Anne as being in her early twenties and working as a domestic, while her teenage brother Thomas worked as a servant. But they both still lived in this mill, even as working adults. Mary Anne moved away that year when she married a farmer named Lewis Jones.
And I happen to have a photo of their entire resultant brood.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
This image has the only photo I can find of Mary Anne. She's the one sitting down on the front right. It's a bleak photo but she does have some vague resemblance to her mother.
Mary Anne and Lewis are the two sitting adults. Behind them stand their older children. From left to right we have Elizabeth (born 1893), Polly (born 1883), Annie (born 1888), John (born 1885) and Jane (born 1890).
Stood in the middle of the two parents are Tommy (born 1898 and Gladys (Born 1900), meaning this photo was probably taken around 1906. None of these children would actually live in the mill, but since Mary Anne had spent her childhood here, and her parents and siblings still lived here, it's possible that they visited occasionally.
I'm going to show some more old photos of these people anyway, because I love old photos. Someone in this family must have been a keen photographer, because they just keep on giving.
(photo not mine, obviously)
This is Elizabeth. Documents from the 1930s show that she married a farmer.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
This is apparently John and his wife Catherine. This photo is apparently from 1918, but there are photos of these two together and still clearly in love in the 1960s, which is kinda sweet. They had a farm in Nantmawr.
(photo not mine, obviously)
And this is Thomas and his wife Nellie. According to records, he fought in the first world war, and came home to become a train driver. There is a bit of resemblance between him and his brother John, so much so that I thought they were the same guy for a bit.
But I do have a sprinkling of autistic face blindness so maybe I'm just being a fool.
(photo not mine, obviously)
And here we have Jane and her daughter Mair. The photo was apparently taken around 1920, but I suspect it may be slightly earlier given that Mair is listed on records from the 1930s as being a farm maid.
For some reason I find it really weird looking at old photos of children, knowing that they've since grown up, lived their life, gotten old and died.
But that about wraps it up for Mary Anne's brood. None of them lived here in the mill, except Mary Anne herself when she was a child, so researching them was a bit of a side quest. But fear not, we're back on track!
According to the 1891 census, Jane and John Rogers were still living here in the mill, with whoever among their brood hadn't married and fucked off. So that was Thomas, Edward, and Ellen. Thomas was apparently helping to run the mill at this point.
Their brother Gomer was still around. He actually got himself a job as a waggoner at the farm, and upgraded from soggy cramped mill to soggy cramped servants quarters, while still being close to his family.
There's a newspaper article from 1890 that tells of the farmer and his waggoner being involved in an accident when they lost control of the horse. The horse apparently bolted quite suddenly and pulled the wagon along, allegedly running over a cow. That's... impressive. Was it just lying there or something?
Both the farmer and the servant were flung from the wagon. They survived but the waggoner was said to have a scalp wound among other injuries. I assume the wagon was destroyed. I mean, running over a cow is going to do more damage to the vehicle than it will to the cow, even today.
So while the waggoner goes unnamed, we can assume from the census that it was either Gomer, or his unlucky predecessor.
According to the 1901 census, the family had moved out of the mill, and its residential use had come to an end. The brothers, Thomas and Edward, went on to be millers elsewhere. Edward married, but Thomas still lived with them. The two brothers must have been close because when Thomas died in 1912, Edward and Hannah named their son after him.
Gomer went on to become a gamekeeper, and have two children named John and Jane, named after his parents, and then a third child named Elizabeth Ellen, named after two of his sisters.
Dunno why he's showing respect through names to a family that named him Gomer. Maybe he was making a point that kindness costs nothing. Maybe that head injury was worse than we thought.
There's a photo of Elizabeth Ellen on her wedding day in 1921.
It's so cool to see this. This photo is 104 years old. It's amazing to be able to write about these people and bring them to life through old photos. Reading names off a document is one thing, but it's ultimately just words. These were real people with dreams and loved ones. They hung out with their friends, they gave each other affection, and they looked forward to the future, never suspecting that someone would be writing about them a century later.
But even though the Jones and Rogers family were done with his mill, my adventure is far from over. It's time to head upstairs!
But it's okay. I'm not a criminal. I come in peace.
These hexagonal contraptions are the mill stones, used for grinding wheat.
Upstairs is this fantastic contraption. This is apparently an "oil cake breaker." The oil cake was, according to wikipedia, the residue left over from pressing seed to make linseed oil. The oil cake would then be crushed down using this machine and then fed to cattle.
These hexagonal contraptions are the mill stones, used for grinding wheat.
Over against the walls we have numbered cabinets, and these are situated directly above the chutes that we saw on the floor below.
One of the flour dresser cabinets had this trio of bats just hanging out. I'm always careful not to disturb bats too much. I get my pictures as quickly as possible and then leave them alone. In many cases, the protected status of bats is what causes abandoned places to stay preserved. No alterations will be made until the colony can be rehomed. So for an ethical urbexer, bats are our friends.
Lifting up the lid, we can see a flour dresser. This is basically just a big cylindrical sieve. In its heyday it would have had a wire mesh. Any corn inside would be brushed against the mesh, been broken down into finer particles, and then pushed through the mesh and into the chutes below.
One of the flour dresser cabinets had this trio of bats just hanging out. I'm always careful not to disturb bats too much. I get my pictures as quickly as possible and then leave them alone. In many cases, the protected status of bats is what causes abandoned places to stay preserved. No alterations will be made until the colony can be rehomed. So for an ethical urbexer, bats are our friends.
And they're cuter than the majority of humans.
(photo not mine, obviously)
The article said that Captain Harrop ran the farm purely for commercial use, which confused me somewhat because I thought that most farms were for commercial use.
But I guess it doesn't matter. The 1941 article mentioned that Captain Harrop powered all of the farm equipment with wires and pulleys from a turbine installed near an ancient mill nearby. That has to be this one. It turns out that at some point an engineer from Llanuwchllyn named Richard Edwards had installed a turbine that enabled the mill to power the farm. He'd done a similar thing in his home village too.
There's another staircase leading up to the attic.
There's another bat here, chilling out away from the others, part of their colony but not part of their group. I totally relate to this bat.
But with the floorboards sagging under my weight, I decided to call it a day!
I'll finish on some shots of vintage graffiti that was dotted around the place.
This graffiti is dated 1946 and 1959.
The mill allegedly ceased functioning in the late 1940s or 1950s, and this graffiti certainly seems to support that. It's like whoever was here last decided to leave their mark before they closed the doors seemingly forever. The farm remained with the Harrop family until at least 1999 but the mill was never used again.
That seems to be it for the mill. On a final note, the novelist Stanley Weyman wrote a book called Ovington's Bank which allegedly features a home modelled on this estate. I haven't read it, but given that the book was published in 1922, if it does mention the mill at all, it could actually be an interesting first-hand account of it in its heyday, albeit filtered through a work of fiction.
Maybe I'll give it a read.
But really, with all that mill equipment still there, still possibly functional, it's an absolute shame that the mill can't be restored and made accessible to the public. The bats might be an obstacle, but this is is a window into another era, and it would be cool to see it brought back to life.
But for now, that concludes my mooch around this mill. My next blog will be something to do with trains, and it's pretty damn awesome. In the meantime the best way to stay up to date with my blogs is... probably to just message me periodically to ask, if I'm honest. I usually say follow me on Facebook or Instagram, and you can do that if you want, but the algorithm hates me so I'd be absolutely lying if I said it was the best way. You might as well just check back here in a week and see what's new.
But I am still on those sites for some reason. I'm also on Twitter. And I'm also on the happier social media platforms, Bluesky, Vero and Cara. They're smaller, but people who post there are actually seen by the people who chose to follow them, and as far as I'm concerned, that makes them superior to anything owned by Zuckerberg, because that's what social media should be. Not about farming engagement through rage bait.
Anyway, thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment