FOULRIDGE VERSUS BARLICK. ROUND 4.
Posted: 20 Jan 2026, 03:32
FOULRIDGE VERSUS BARLICK. ROUND 4.
In the process of working our way along Higher Lane as far as Cross Gaits last week we jumped over Black Brook (County Brook) without taking a proper look at it. There was a good reason for this, I wanted to save it for this week, the fourth in our study of the 1580 map. There is a copy of the map in the library together with my notes on it and if you missed the last three instalments, scour the town for back numbers.
Right, let’s enjoy ourselves, but before we do, we have to take note of some facts which we need to understand before we get down to the serious business of poking about on County Brook. The first thing to remember is that Whitemoor reservoir wasn’t built until 1840. By then, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal was coming under increasing pressure as the amount of traffic was greater than they had anticipated. The stretch of canal or ‘pound’ between Barrowford Locks and Greenberfield is the summit level, in other words it is the highest part of the canal. The greater the number of boats using the canal, the more water is used in the locks at each end of the summit level and the greater the amount of water needed to make up the losses. This situation had been a constant worry since the canal came into use. In 1796, following the completion of Foulridge tunnel, the canal reached the stage where it was open from Leeds to Burnley and the water supply to the summit level was taken from various springs and streams along the way plus three reservoirs, two above Ball Bridge, now known as Foulridge Lower and Upper and one at Slipper Hill fed by water off the west side of Whitemoor.
Incidentally, older readers might remember a time in the late 1960’s when a sign mysteriously appeared on the side of the road at Foulridge which declared to the world that Foulridge Lower Reservoir was actually ‘Lake Burwain’. The word was that some of the locals thought it would raise the tone of the area and property prices as well. The Canal Company took a dim view of this and as the new sign had been erected on their land it was rapidly replaced by one which read ‘Foulridge Lower Reservoir’. This was the end of that particular gentrification project!
By 1810 the company was actively seeking extra water. In 1815 they purchased the lease of the County Brook for £100 per annum. We don’t know who owned the riparian rights for certain but most likely it was the land owners along the watercourse, it will have an important bearing on things we will look at later on. The problem of low water persisted so they brought John Rennie in, a noted civil engineer, to have a look at the problem. His first recommendation was that the two rise lock at Greenberfield should be replaced by three separate locks on a different line. His reasoning was that multiple rise locks (locks that share gates like the ‘Five Rise’ at Bingley) use more water than single locks and the existing two-rise lock was in bad condition anyway and needed extensive re-building, you can still see the original line of the canal at Greenberfield if you go and look. At the same time, Foulridge Lower Reservoir was enlarged by the simple expedient of raising the embankment two feet at a cost of £150! Later on they repeated the exercise, this time raising it a further three feet at a cost of £4,119. Even so, they were still short of water.
The purchase of the lease at County Brook must have concentrated minds and by 1840 the company had built Whitemoor Reservoir at a cost of £10,150. In 1861 Foulridge Upper Reservoir was started and completed in 1866 at a cost of £14,774. In 1882 a reservoir was built at Barrowford to catch the overflow from Whitemoor and Slipper Hill but at the same time the company were starting on a major new reservoir at Winterburn above Eshton. This reservoir, together with the pipeline connecting it to Greenberfield was completed in 1893 and relieved the situation but didn’t completely cure it. By 1890 an average of ninety boats a week was passing the summit.
At this point I can hear you saying that this is all very interesting but what’s it got to do with Black Brook. A good question and the answer is that in order to understand the events on Black Brook, you have to know what the pressures were on the canal company because the measures they took to control and utilise the water had a direct effect on how County Brook developed. There is one more fact we have to take into account, there was no need for water power in the textile industry of the area until Arkwright had perfected his water frame which was the first practical power-driven spinning machine. He took out patents to restrict use of the principle to those who paid him for a licence but in 1785 his monopoly was broken and the technology was thrown open to all. This started a boom in the conversion of old water mills and the building of new ones for the water-powered spinning of cotton. (I have since learned that the Arkwright Water Frame was not as important as I thought because we have no definite evidence of them being used in Barnoldswick. It seems more likely that the first water mills were operating earlier crude machinery to produce 'sliver', the form of material that hand-spinners could use most efficiently. This pushes the date of the early mills back to perhaps 1770.)
Right, we’ve done the spade-work, we can get on now with the enjoyable bit! We’ve already noted that the sources of the water draining down County Brook are the spring that fed Lister Well, the water running out of ‘Gail Mose or Fail Mire’ marked on the 1580 map and of course, natural drainage of surface water on this part of the moor. Before 1840 all this water combined just above Wood End and flowed down the gill towards Salterforth Bottoms. The watercourse that we can see now emerging from the culvert under Higher Lane is essentially unchanged from what would have been there in 1580 even though everything above the road has changed. At the Higher Lane it is 700 feet above sea level and down at canal level it is 500 feet so there is a fall of 200 feet on a sizeable watercourse over a distance of half a mile. This is an ideal water power site and could have served several mills. Let’s walk down the road and see what we can find, anybody can do this, it isn’t rocket science.
The first thing of interest we see isn’t a water mill, it’s Mount Pleasant Methodist Chapel at Hey Fold. This is a wonderful little chapel which is still in use. I’ve read somewhere that Wesley once preached there but can’t remember the source. The chapel was founded in 1822 by John Barritt who was born at Hullet Hall Farm (now Owlet Nest) in 1745, he entered the Wesleyan ministry and accompanied John Wesley at times as he travelled around the north of England preaching. John’s sister Mary was a woman preacher and became accepted as a leading exponent of the Methodist movement. I like this chapel with its lack of frills and an air of do it yourself Christianity. If this isn’t grass roots religion I don’t know what is and I’m all in favour of it. There were still Barritts at Hey Fold next to Mount Pleasant in 1960 when I delivered their groceries.
Just below the chapel, down in the clough, there are some ruins. If you look carefully you can see the outline of a mill lodge, a building and a depression which at one time would have housed the water wheel. This is the site of Midge Hole Mill which we know was taken over by Ezra Sellers from his brother Marshall sometime in the mid 19th century and was in production until 1882. Thanks to dedicated research by another local historian, Wilfred Spencer, formerly librarian at Colne, we also know why Ezra gave up the mill and why it never ran again. Ezra said that “the new canal company waterman wanted too much palm oil”. In other words, he was asking for a bigger bribe than the old waterman to let water down from the reservoir at times which would suit the workings of the mill. This needs a bit of explanation.
In the days before the canal company built the reservoir there would be no problem in running the mill so long as there was enough water running down County Brook to power the wheel. The only time there would have been a shortage of water was in time of drought in summer or very hard frost in winter. Once the reservoir was built, all this changed. Say the reservoir was low and the canal company wanted to build up their reserves, they could shut the clow (the sluice gate that controlled what water dropped down the stream) and keep all the water in the reservoir. This meant that Midge Hole, or any other mill on the stream for that matter, would have to stop work. The waterman employed by the company had the mill owner by the throat. If he let water down to the canal at night but stopped it during the day he would stop the mill. If a small payment persuaded him to let the water down during the day the mill could run. This was the ‘palm oil’ that Ezra Sellers was alluding to. Evidently the waterman got too greedy and lost his source of income!
From the size of it I would say that Midge Hole started life as a water-spinning mill taking advantage of the new technology sometime after 1785. It looks about the right size. There’s a bit of a trick to this, mills using Arkwright’s water frame are all about the same width, 27 or 28 feet as this was the space needed to accommodate a frame and a walkway on one side. Midge Hole looks about right although we know that from the mid 19th century it was running as a weaving mill with about 24 looms weaving winceyette shirting for the Bradford market. Old Mr Barritt at Hey Fold told Helen Spencer it was the canal company that demolished the mill and they used the stone to build a wharf down on the canal near where the water from the stream flows in. Did they buy the mill in 1815 when they took the lease on the water? If there was an existing lease I would have thought that Midge Hole would have controlled it.
As more and more people do research we may learn more about Midge Hole. I got a tantalising clue the other day when I got a letter from Chris Aspin who has done a lot of work on these mills. He told me he had come across a reference to a ‘worsted mill’ in Foulridge in some insurance company records. This must have been an early mill and if it was, is one of the very few references to Arkwright’s water frame being used for wool, the other two are at Addingham and Dolphinholme. I think the main lesson we have to learn at this stage from Midge Hole is the influence the canal company had on it’s running. Their management of the water closed what was a promising mill site which was quite capable of expansion.
Before we go any further down the road it would be as well to point out that it is private from here on. It would be polite to ask for permission from County Brook Mill before going any further, I have little doubt that it would be granted. As you walk down the road observe the ground carefully on the far side of the stream. You will see unnatural straight banks just above the stream and these give a clue to what is going to happen next. What you are looking at are the remains of a mill leat which carried water from a dam across the stream in an artificial culvert with just enough fall to transport water. As the stream itself is falling much more rapidly the difference in height between the leat and the stream is growing. This difference in height is what you need to run a water wheel. There was no need for a leat at Midge Hole because the bed of the stream is falling so rapidly at that point that there was enough difference in height between the top side of the mill and the low side to give the fall necessary to run a wheel. In the case we are looking at now, we are building up enough of a fall to drive another mill, this is Wood End Mill.
Further down the County Brook, just above the Stew Mill, there is a footbridge [I realised during later research it is a packhorse bridge.] across the brook and if you look carefully above this point you can see traces of a building and a mill leat. This was the site of Wood End Mill and the first mention I have of this is in about 1694/95 in a letter written by Thomas Barcroft of Noyna Hall at Foulridge to Richard Moore of Ball House Foulridge. Thomas is complaining about the fact that Richard is threatening to take him to court over non-payment of rent for Burwains Mill, a corn mill which stood in the valley now flooded for Foulridge Lower Reservoir. He cites one of the reasons for bad trade at Burwains being because of Pollard’s recently built mill at Wood End. By implication he seems to suggest that Wood End was a corn mill and had a drying kiln which was a big advantage in a damp climate like the Pennines. So we know that there was a mill at Wood End before 1694. We have to use our heads and make some deductions from the Barcroft diaries to get any further with this mill.
In 1694/95 Thomas Barcroft describes Wood End as ‘recently built’. What is ‘recent’ in this context. It seems a fair guess that in terms of its affect on Burwains that we are talking about ten or fifteen years. Remember what I said earlier on about the evidence of an increase of population in the area. This didn’t just put pressure on the production of food which forced the taking in of land from the waste but also to the means of processing it. Corn mills were a vital resource for grinding locally produced grain both for human and animal food and as the demand increased, new capacity had to be found. Up to the middle of the 16th century water power was a jealously guarded source of wealth. The sites were all either Royal Mills operated under Crown licence, monastic mills controlled by the monasteries or manorial mills rented out by the Lord of a manor. The Dissolution of the Monasteries from about 1535 onwards threw all the monastic mills on to the open market and at the same time fractured the rigid systems of control that had tied down entrepreneurs for hundreds of years. It becomes common at this time to find references in various Court Rolls of fines being imposed on the owners of ‘pirate’ mills which had been built to satisfy the increased demand. The courts sometimes recognised that these mills were necessary to solve the problem of shortage of capacity and allowed them to function as long as they paid the fines but in other cases ordered their demolition. By the mid 17th century there had been a further relaxation and the courts no longer exercised any control. If a person could acquire the rights to use the water and had the capital to buy the land and build a mill, he was free to do so. It seems that this was exactly what Pollard did, he saw a gap in the market, built a mill and ground corn. Having said this, we have no clear idea of how long he was in business or what stopped him. All I can say with certainty at this point is that on a map of Midgeley’s Wood End Estate dated 1810, Wood End Mill is marked as ‘ruins of (?) mill’ so we know that whatever stopped it, it wasn’t the canal company as they didn’t control the water until 1815.
If you want to get serious about this here’s a clue, according to Peter Wightman’s Wills of Colne, the Lancashire record office at Preston holds the following documents: Alice Pollard of Slipper Hill, 1676. Admin and inventory. John Pollard, yeoman of Foulridge. 1608 Admin and inventory. John Pollard of Slipper Hill. 1675. Will. Take a trip out and have a look at these, then let me know what you found! It will save me another little task.
I mentioned that there was an indication that Wood End had a drying kiln, here’s a tip about drying kilns connected with mills. The corn was dried on heavy cloth made of a mixture of wool and horsehair supported by poles over a small fire. The poles were in turn located by grooves cut into stones surrounding the aperture over the fire. These are known as ‘rack stones’ and are quite easy to identify. If ever you’re looking at an old corn mill site, examine the walls adjacent to the site carefully because old stone was always re-used in the vicinity and the rack stones are quite easy to spot. If you find them you can be certain that there was a kiln somewhere near.
Well, I think we’ve used up our allocation of space for this week. Next week I’ll finish County Brook off by having a look at the last, and biggest mill on the stream, County Brook Mill.
21 April 2000
In the process of working our way along Higher Lane as far as Cross Gaits last week we jumped over Black Brook (County Brook) without taking a proper look at it. There was a good reason for this, I wanted to save it for this week, the fourth in our study of the 1580 map. There is a copy of the map in the library together with my notes on it and if you missed the last three instalments, scour the town for back numbers.
Right, let’s enjoy ourselves, but before we do, we have to take note of some facts which we need to understand before we get down to the serious business of poking about on County Brook. The first thing to remember is that Whitemoor reservoir wasn’t built until 1840. By then, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal was coming under increasing pressure as the amount of traffic was greater than they had anticipated. The stretch of canal or ‘pound’ between Barrowford Locks and Greenberfield is the summit level, in other words it is the highest part of the canal. The greater the number of boats using the canal, the more water is used in the locks at each end of the summit level and the greater the amount of water needed to make up the losses. This situation had been a constant worry since the canal came into use. In 1796, following the completion of Foulridge tunnel, the canal reached the stage where it was open from Leeds to Burnley and the water supply to the summit level was taken from various springs and streams along the way plus three reservoirs, two above Ball Bridge, now known as Foulridge Lower and Upper and one at Slipper Hill fed by water off the west side of Whitemoor.
Incidentally, older readers might remember a time in the late 1960’s when a sign mysteriously appeared on the side of the road at Foulridge which declared to the world that Foulridge Lower Reservoir was actually ‘Lake Burwain’. The word was that some of the locals thought it would raise the tone of the area and property prices as well. The Canal Company took a dim view of this and as the new sign had been erected on their land it was rapidly replaced by one which read ‘Foulridge Lower Reservoir’. This was the end of that particular gentrification project!
By 1810 the company was actively seeking extra water. In 1815 they purchased the lease of the County Brook for £100 per annum. We don’t know who owned the riparian rights for certain but most likely it was the land owners along the watercourse, it will have an important bearing on things we will look at later on. The problem of low water persisted so they brought John Rennie in, a noted civil engineer, to have a look at the problem. His first recommendation was that the two rise lock at Greenberfield should be replaced by three separate locks on a different line. His reasoning was that multiple rise locks (locks that share gates like the ‘Five Rise’ at Bingley) use more water than single locks and the existing two-rise lock was in bad condition anyway and needed extensive re-building, you can still see the original line of the canal at Greenberfield if you go and look. At the same time, Foulridge Lower Reservoir was enlarged by the simple expedient of raising the embankment two feet at a cost of £150! Later on they repeated the exercise, this time raising it a further three feet at a cost of £4,119. Even so, they were still short of water.
The purchase of the lease at County Brook must have concentrated minds and by 1840 the company had built Whitemoor Reservoir at a cost of £10,150. In 1861 Foulridge Upper Reservoir was started and completed in 1866 at a cost of £14,774. In 1882 a reservoir was built at Barrowford to catch the overflow from Whitemoor and Slipper Hill but at the same time the company were starting on a major new reservoir at Winterburn above Eshton. This reservoir, together with the pipeline connecting it to Greenberfield was completed in 1893 and relieved the situation but didn’t completely cure it. By 1890 an average of ninety boats a week was passing the summit.
At this point I can hear you saying that this is all very interesting but what’s it got to do with Black Brook. A good question and the answer is that in order to understand the events on Black Brook, you have to know what the pressures were on the canal company because the measures they took to control and utilise the water had a direct effect on how County Brook developed. There is one more fact we have to take into account, there was no need for water power in the textile industry of the area until Arkwright had perfected his water frame which was the first practical power-driven spinning machine. He took out patents to restrict use of the principle to those who paid him for a licence but in 1785 his monopoly was broken and the technology was thrown open to all. This started a boom in the conversion of old water mills and the building of new ones for the water-powered spinning of cotton. (I have since learned that the Arkwright Water Frame was not as important as I thought because we have no definite evidence of them being used in Barnoldswick. It seems more likely that the first water mills were operating earlier crude machinery to produce 'sliver', the form of material that hand-spinners could use most efficiently. This pushes the date of the early mills back to perhaps 1770.)
Right, we’ve done the spade-work, we can get on now with the enjoyable bit! We’ve already noted that the sources of the water draining down County Brook are the spring that fed Lister Well, the water running out of ‘Gail Mose or Fail Mire’ marked on the 1580 map and of course, natural drainage of surface water on this part of the moor. Before 1840 all this water combined just above Wood End and flowed down the gill towards Salterforth Bottoms. The watercourse that we can see now emerging from the culvert under Higher Lane is essentially unchanged from what would have been there in 1580 even though everything above the road has changed. At the Higher Lane it is 700 feet above sea level and down at canal level it is 500 feet so there is a fall of 200 feet on a sizeable watercourse over a distance of half a mile. This is an ideal water power site and could have served several mills. Let’s walk down the road and see what we can find, anybody can do this, it isn’t rocket science.
The first thing of interest we see isn’t a water mill, it’s Mount Pleasant Methodist Chapel at Hey Fold. This is a wonderful little chapel which is still in use. I’ve read somewhere that Wesley once preached there but can’t remember the source. The chapel was founded in 1822 by John Barritt who was born at Hullet Hall Farm (now Owlet Nest) in 1745, he entered the Wesleyan ministry and accompanied John Wesley at times as he travelled around the north of England preaching. John’s sister Mary was a woman preacher and became accepted as a leading exponent of the Methodist movement. I like this chapel with its lack of frills and an air of do it yourself Christianity. If this isn’t grass roots religion I don’t know what is and I’m all in favour of it. There were still Barritts at Hey Fold next to Mount Pleasant in 1960 when I delivered their groceries.
Just below the chapel, down in the clough, there are some ruins. If you look carefully you can see the outline of a mill lodge, a building and a depression which at one time would have housed the water wheel. This is the site of Midge Hole Mill which we know was taken over by Ezra Sellers from his brother Marshall sometime in the mid 19th century and was in production until 1882. Thanks to dedicated research by another local historian, Wilfred Spencer, formerly librarian at Colne, we also know why Ezra gave up the mill and why it never ran again. Ezra said that “the new canal company waterman wanted too much palm oil”. In other words, he was asking for a bigger bribe than the old waterman to let water down from the reservoir at times which would suit the workings of the mill. This needs a bit of explanation.
In the days before the canal company built the reservoir there would be no problem in running the mill so long as there was enough water running down County Brook to power the wheel. The only time there would have been a shortage of water was in time of drought in summer or very hard frost in winter. Once the reservoir was built, all this changed. Say the reservoir was low and the canal company wanted to build up their reserves, they could shut the clow (the sluice gate that controlled what water dropped down the stream) and keep all the water in the reservoir. This meant that Midge Hole, or any other mill on the stream for that matter, would have to stop work. The waterman employed by the company had the mill owner by the throat. If he let water down to the canal at night but stopped it during the day he would stop the mill. If a small payment persuaded him to let the water down during the day the mill could run. This was the ‘palm oil’ that Ezra Sellers was alluding to. Evidently the waterman got too greedy and lost his source of income!
From the size of it I would say that Midge Hole started life as a water-spinning mill taking advantage of the new technology sometime after 1785. It looks about the right size. There’s a bit of a trick to this, mills using Arkwright’s water frame are all about the same width, 27 or 28 feet as this was the space needed to accommodate a frame and a walkway on one side. Midge Hole looks about right although we know that from the mid 19th century it was running as a weaving mill with about 24 looms weaving winceyette shirting for the Bradford market. Old Mr Barritt at Hey Fold told Helen Spencer it was the canal company that demolished the mill and they used the stone to build a wharf down on the canal near where the water from the stream flows in. Did they buy the mill in 1815 when they took the lease on the water? If there was an existing lease I would have thought that Midge Hole would have controlled it.
As more and more people do research we may learn more about Midge Hole. I got a tantalising clue the other day when I got a letter from Chris Aspin who has done a lot of work on these mills. He told me he had come across a reference to a ‘worsted mill’ in Foulridge in some insurance company records. This must have been an early mill and if it was, is one of the very few references to Arkwright’s water frame being used for wool, the other two are at Addingham and Dolphinholme. I think the main lesson we have to learn at this stage from Midge Hole is the influence the canal company had on it’s running. Their management of the water closed what was a promising mill site which was quite capable of expansion.
Before we go any further down the road it would be as well to point out that it is private from here on. It would be polite to ask for permission from County Brook Mill before going any further, I have little doubt that it would be granted. As you walk down the road observe the ground carefully on the far side of the stream. You will see unnatural straight banks just above the stream and these give a clue to what is going to happen next. What you are looking at are the remains of a mill leat which carried water from a dam across the stream in an artificial culvert with just enough fall to transport water. As the stream itself is falling much more rapidly the difference in height between the leat and the stream is growing. This difference in height is what you need to run a water wheel. There was no need for a leat at Midge Hole because the bed of the stream is falling so rapidly at that point that there was enough difference in height between the top side of the mill and the low side to give the fall necessary to run a wheel. In the case we are looking at now, we are building up enough of a fall to drive another mill, this is Wood End Mill.
Further down the County Brook, just above the Stew Mill, there is a footbridge [I realised during later research it is a packhorse bridge.] across the brook and if you look carefully above this point you can see traces of a building and a mill leat. This was the site of Wood End Mill and the first mention I have of this is in about 1694/95 in a letter written by Thomas Barcroft of Noyna Hall at Foulridge to Richard Moore of Ball House Foulridge. Thomas is complaining about the fact that Richard is threatening to take him to court over non-payment of rent for Burwains Mill, a corn mill which stood in the valley now flooded for Foulridge Lower Reservoir. He cites one of the reasons for bad trade at Burwains being because of Pollard’s recently built mill at Wood End. By implication he seems to suggest that Wood End was a corn mill and had a drying kiln which was a big advantage in a damp climate like the Pennines. So we know that there was a mill at Wood End before 1694. We have to use our heads and make some deductions from the Barcroft diaries to get any further with this mill.
In 1694/95 Thomas Barcroft describes Wood End as ‘recently built’. What is ‘recent’ in this context. It seems a fair guess that in terms of its affect on Burwains that we are talking about ten or fifteen years. Remember what I said earlier on about the evidence of an increase of population in the area. This didn’t just put pressure on the production of food which forced the taking in of land from the waste but also to the means of processing it. Corn mills were a vital resource for grinding locally produced grain both for human and animal food and as the demand increased, new capacity had to be found. Up to the middle of the 16th century water power was a jealously guarded source of wealth. The sites were all either Royal Mills operated under Crown licence, monastic mills controlled by the monasteries or manorial mills rented out by the Lord of a manor. The Dissolution of the Monasteries from about 1535 onwards threw all the monastic mills on to the open market and at the same time fractured the rigid systems of control that had tied down entrepreneurs for hundreds of years. It becomes common at this time to find references in various Court Rolls of fines being imposed on the owners of ‘pirate’ mills which had been built to satisfy the increased demand. The courts sometimes recognised that these mills were necessary to solve the problem of shortage of capacity and allowed them to function as long as they paid the fines but in other cases ordered their demolition. By the mid 17th century there had been a further relaxation and the courts no longer exercised any control. If a person could acquire the rights to use the water and had the capital to buy the land and build a mill, he was free to do so. It seems that this was exactly what Pollard did, he saw a gap in the market, built a mill and ground corn. Having said this, we have no clear idea of how long he was in business or what stopped him. All I can say with certainty at this point is that on a map of Midgeley’s Wood End Estate dated 1810, Wood End Mill is marked as ‘ruins of (?) mill’ so we know that whatever stopped it, it wasn’t the canal company as they didn’t control the water until 1815.
If you want to get serious about this here’s a clue, according to Peter Wightman’s Wills of Colne, the Lancashire record office at Preston holds the following documents: Alice Pollard of Slipper Hill, 1676. Admin and inventory. John Pollard, yeoman of Foulridge. 1608 Admin and inventory. John Pollard of Slipper Hill. 1675. Will. Take a trip out and have a look at these, then let me know what you found! It will save me another little task.
I mentioned that there was an indication that Wood End had a drying kiln, here’s a tip about drying kilns connected with mills. The corn was dried on heavy cloth made of a mixture of wool and horsehair supported by poles over a small fire. The poles were in turn located by grooves cut into stones surrounding the aperture over the fire. These are known as ‘rack stones’ and are quite easy to identify. If ever you’re looking at an old corn mill site, examine the walls adjacent to the site carefully because old stone was always re-used in the vicinity and the rack stones are quite easy to spot. If you find them you can be certain that there was a kiln somewhere near.
Well, I think we’ve used up our allocation of space for this week. Next week I’ll finish County Brook off by having a look at the last, and biggest mill on the stream, County Brook Mill.
21 April 2000