The nearest paved road is about 5km by track from the mill - the bottom km was impassible when we found the place, but nothing a day with a bulldozer and a chainsaw couldn’t fix - it looked like about 60 years of growth. The track down the valley is steep and winding, and looks like it goes nowhere. Despite being at the bottom of a deep, steep valley, we get an almost full day of light, as the mill is on the north bank of a large inverted U bend in the river - the sun rises over the valley to our left, grazes the hills to the south, and sets over the valley to the right. Someone in the 1300s really thought about where to put the structure, as 50m either way along the bank gets shaded way more.
Right now we’re having to walk in and out, as we had prodigious rain in December, which both highlighted our flood risk (overtopped the roof!) and made a steep, poorly drained section of the road collapse - I’ve spent the past week teaching myself how to make a pitched stone road - nice Neolithic technique, and means all the materials I need are within spitting distance of the road - rock, gravel.
The next mill, which is about 1.5km downstream of us, has no road or track, just a steep path.
I am still scratching my head over how they built them - the lower courses of stones in the walls must weigh five tonnes apiece - huge boulders, moved purely with human and animal power. After seeing the river go crazy last month, I understand why - the force was sufficient to uproot large trees, to wash away the car, to completely scout the earth to bare rock - but the mill couldn’t have cared less. It’s good timing, insofar as we hadn’t done too much work yet, and now we know we need to ensure everything structural in there can deal with immersion, and everything else needs to be portable. Constraint, sure, but an interesting one.
While shovelling muck there yesterday (temporarily renting a house after being flooded out) I heard a loud plop over the roar of the weir - and saw two otters hunting crayfish in the mill pond - I could see them flipping rocks on the bottom and grabbing them, as the flood has washed away sediments and organics, leaving the water crystal clear. This is the stuff that makes me persevere!