Mill House, mill building and bakehouse, Clee St. Margaret, Shropshire

Summary

A water-powered corn mill with house and bakehouse, all of apparently C18 date.

Description

A house, water-powered corn mill and bakehouse, all of apparently C18 date.

MATERIALS: the buildings are of roughly coursed red sandstone, with weatherboarding to the agricultural buildings adjoining the house. The house and mill have clay-tile roofs, the bakehouse has a slate roof.

PLAN: the complex is located on the north side of the Clee Brook. The mill, house and bakehouse are all rectangular in plan. The house and bakehouse are opposite each other and aligned north-west / south-east with their south-east gables facing the road. These gable ends form a gateway to the complex. The mill building is aligned more closely to east-west than the other buildings and is around 10m north-west of the house. The millpond is now dry but is visible as an earthwork north and east of the mill.

HOUSE

EXTERIOR: the house is a single-storey building with cellar and attic. The front elevation faces south-west. The house is built into a bank to its rear (north-east elevation), leaving the cellar above ground to the front. A barn and pigsty abut the north-west gable end of the house; a straight joint between these and the house suggest that they are a later addition. The house and barn are all under the same pitched roof which has an unbroken ridge line. The pigsty is lower in height than the rest of the buildings and is set back from the front line of the house. The barn is stone, but the front is weatherboarded and has timber plank doors. At ground floor level the front of the house has a central door with a canopy porch over, with a stair-light immediately to the south-east. The door and stair-light are flanked by two three-light casement windows. The windows have shallow arched lintels of bricks laid in a single course with rowlock edges facing. The front elevation below ground floor has an off-centre door to the cellar. Also below ground level on the front elevation are steps up to the front door. The steps continue from their top into a raised path along the front of the house and attached agricultural buildings. The rear of the house has a central door flanked by two windows at ground floor level. There is a brick chimney stack to the solid south-east gable of the house, and a large stack with stone lower and brick upper courses to the rear elevation. The attic has two later gabled brick dormer windows to the front above the eaves line, aligned with the ground floor casements. There is a single cat-slide dormer to the rear roof slope.

INTERIOR: not inspected. From available information, the house has a three-bay plan with central hallway and staircase. There are chamfered beams to living room and kitchen ceilings, with exposed joists in the kitchen. The kitchen has a large timber bressummer over the bricked-up fireplace. The living room has a C20 brick fireplace. There is a further C20 fireplace in one of the bedrooms. Reputedly the cellar retains its original flagstones and a salting bench.

MILL BUILDING

EXTERIOR: two stories and attic under a pitched roof. The building is dug into the steep bank to the north, and there are no openings on this side. The east elevation has a door at ground level, a blocked first floor opening and a casement attic window. There is a single-storey lean-to on the south elevation with a window above it at first floor level. The water wheel was mounted on the west side of the building but no longer survives.

INTERIOR: not inspected. Available information includes photographs showing details of wooden machinery including the top of an upright shaft with crown wheel and pinion, and a large horizontal toothed wheel.

BAKEHOUSE

EXTERIOR: low single-storey pitched roof building. It has a stone chimney stack to its south-east gable end. There is a central door and single window to the front, (north-east) facing elevation.

INTERIOR: not inspected. Available information includes photographs showing a large bread oven.

History

A mill is recorded at Clee St Margaret in the Domesday Book of 1086. The present house (with adjoining barn and pigsty), mill and bakehouse all appear to date to the C18 and all three buildings appear on the 1842 tithe map. The buildings are all shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey Map, and the revision of 1903. The 1903 edition labels the mill as a corn mill. The same map shows a channel running north then east from the Clee Brook meeting the pond north of the mill, and a channel running back to the brook south-west from the mill. The lean-to on the south elevation of the mill doesn’t appear on the tithe map, but does on the first edition Ordnance Survey. The bakehouse is depicted as a smaller structure on the tithe map than on later mapping, suggesting that it could have been extended or rebuilt in the late-C19. All maps show the addition of the barn and pigsty to the house.

Tithe apportionment records from 11 August 1847 show Edward Turner as the landowner and Richard Lawrence as the occupier of land and premises described as ‘House Mill Pool Building Yard and Garden’. Anecdotally, the mill was last in use in the 1930s. The waterwheel is no longer in place. The house was last renovated in the mid-C20 when it is thought the dormers to the front of the house and the fireplaces were added.

Before the second half of the C19 mills supplied local markets, were generally small-scale and typically wind- or water-driven. Up until the C18, watermills were typically single-storey and were often attached to the miller’s house. The decades either side of 1800 saw the construction of many new multi-storey watermills. These had attic storage, feeding to the milling floor below, that in turn was set above the ground floor where the flour was bagged and dispatched, all making good use of gravity in the processing. This is the case at Clee St Margaret where the mill is a detached building over three floors.

Reasons for Listing

Mill House, the mill building and bakehouse are listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* as a good example of a well preserved mill complex including a multi-storey watermill for corn, a house and bakehouse, all built in the local stone;

* the mill building retains its machinery, a rare survival that will allow a good understanding of the manufacturing processes carried out on site.

Historic interest:

* the buildings give insight into the small scale production of corn flour and bread in the C18 on a site where milling had probably been carried out for many centuries previously.

Group value:

* the three buildings have strong group value in showing the functional relationships between each other, illustrating the operations of an C18 village mill which produced flour and bread for the local market.

External Links

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.