Key

I: = Interviewer
P: = Interviewee
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[5:22 IA] = inaudible section at this time
[word] = best guess at word
… = interruption in sentence, trailing off or short pause

P:I’m the longest serving volunteer at the Watermill, I’ve been doing it for 17 years now. So, yes, I am Chairman of the Trust, I am also the Production Manager for the mill and I am the senior miller. That has a particular relevance because we are members of the Traditional Cornmillers Guild and it isn’t actually the mill that’s a member, it is the Chief Miller that is a member. So I am the nominated miller and when I change, if I retire from it, then whoever takes over will have to be re-audited by the Traditional Cornmillers Guild.

I:And how did you first get involved in the Watermill?

P:I’ve always had an interest in industrial archaeology. If we go back, my grandfather was a locomotive building engineer, he worked at Brighton Railway Works, he was apprenticed there in 1895, I’ve got his apprenticeship papers. He retired just before I was born but he used to take me back to the railway works on their open days and they all still knew him – ‘Hello Ernie.’ He was a popular figure and so I got looking round these engineering works. I also was taken to the place where he was born, which was a waterworks pumping station under the South Downs where there was a piece of machinery which had a gearwheel with wooden cogs, just like some of the wheels at the mill have. So that got me interested in the industrial archaeology, later on I did an Open University leisure course in industrial archaeology and got a certificate in that. When I retired we moved from Leeds, where I’d worked, to the Lake District and we came here because we knew we liked Acorn Bank and said to the then custodian, ‘I’d like to volunteer.’ ‘What are you interested in?’ I said, ‘Well, I like industrial archaeology,’ and it was pretty much a matter of, ‘Well, here’s your spanner, get on with it.’ It was straight to the mill.

I:And you mentioned that that was after you’d retired from Leeds, was your professional working life in any way connected to industrial archaeology?

P:No, I was called an engineer, I was a medical engineer or a medical physicist but specialising in engineering fields.

I:So there’s a lot of experience that would transfer to the love of your life, which is the archaeology.

P:Yes. Engineering is basically using science to solve real problems and so it doesn’t really matter much what sort of engineering you do.

I:So this is 17 years ago that you started volunteering.

P:Yes.

I:At Acorn Bank or at the mill or both?

P:Well, both at the same time. It just so happened that another guy called Richard Harland volunteered at the same time as I did and our first job, which was 17 years ago last month, was to help an outside contractor install a new main axel in the waterwheel. Of course, the old one hadn’t been seasoned properly and it rotted. And we were joined in the following February, March, by a third person, Ray Gill. Between us we decided we didn’t like to see a museum’s piece machinery, it had to be working. In fact, although the mill would turn, the waterwheel would turn, turn one gear on the inside, but it wouldn’t drive the stones. So we decided we were going to make it drive the stones. This wasn’t entirely supported by everyone in the National Trust; we had a curator came and said, ‘Oh, we don’t need any more working watermills.’ So we ignored him and with perhaps a certain amount of trepidation the custodian then supported us. It took us four years to get it to the point where we got flour out of it for the first time and that was the first time in over 70 years that it had actually made anything.

I:I was going to say, do you know? So it’s 70 years that the mill had just been idle?

P:Yes.

I:Do you know the history of it much, as who’d been using it 70 years ago?

P:No, there’s not a very good list of millers. Some mills you can see everybody who ever worked there by looking through various records, and it’s a bit fragmented. There’s no generation after generation from the same family which there is for some mills, they’re all just sort of random names that turn up now and then. We’ve got a fair idea that the present building was put up in 1823 because it says ‘Edmondson 1823’ on the end wall, but we can’t find much out about Edmondson but we assume he was the miller at that time.

I:And always a cornmill, as long as you know?

P:Well, it would… yes, cornmill. It would have originally milled oats rather than wheat but, yes, always a cornmill. Although in some of the later ordnance survey maps it says sawmill as well and we believe that the downstream extension building was built as a sawmill and had the third waterwheel position on it.

I:Fascinating. So let’s come forward again in 70 years; so you’ve got the new equipment and it’s working. What was it like for you when you first saw flour being produced at this mill after the first time in all that time?

P:It was a day of great celebration. We’d put a lot of work into it. We had help from Nick Jones who ran Little Salkeld Watermill, so he was very much an expert. He helped us to actually get the final settings right and he joined us on the day that we finally got it going. And after it was going he gave us all a training course in basic milling. So that’s where we learned our skills really. But, yeah, it was a great day. Somebody found a bottle of wine that was labelled Millstone Rose or something so we drank that in celebration.

I:And you’ve come an enormous way since those early days, then, haven’t you, I think?

P:We have. We struggled for a few years to get the mill milled flour to be useable by the public. For a little while we gave it away and invited a donation but we had to get the Environmental Health approval. It was one of the many occasions, really, where National Trust bureaucracy got in the way because the people dealing with the local Environmental Health lady were not the people who were actually doing the work, they were the National Trust management. So I contrived to be here on one of the afternoons when Environmental Health were visiting and had a discussion with her and said, ‘So if we do this, this and this, it will be alright?’ She said, ‘Yes, I’ll sign you off now if you’re going to do that.’ So it was all compressed. Otherwise it was, ‘Oh if Environmental Health says you’ve got to do this. OK, we’ll do this. Now what does she say?’ And it was backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. So, yeah, we sorted it in the end.

I:So you’re definitely a man who likes to fix problems, aren’t you?

P:Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I like to understand how things work; I don’t like modern cars or modern TVs and things because I don’t really understand them, old-fashioned ones, yes.

I:And when you look at the mill now and when you spend time there, do you relish watching it work and thinking, ‘Yes, I know that’?

P:Yes. I suppose more than anything I relish visitors reactions to it, that is the thing. Because we’ve got it working, it is steady, it is more or less reliable, obviously it needs quite a lot of maintenance, but it’s when you get somebody coming in who has never seen anything like that before, whether it’s the five-year old who comes in and says, ‘Wow!’ or an adult who is impressed and asks all the right questions or, indeed, the six-year old who asks all the right questions, it’s great. Those interactions are what really makes it tick.

I:I might be putting you on the spot here but can you remember any of the questions that you’ve been asked by kids? Because they can sometimes ask some fantastic things, can’t they?

P:Well, they tend to ask a lot of the normal questions, really – how does the water get up there? Which I suppose is something we’ll need to talk about later on. And where does the grain go in and all those sort of things. You get some fairly intelligent questions from kids but they’re usually not the complete off the wall ones that… I can’t really remember any off the wall ones.

I:You’re quite right, we need to talk about the water…

P:We do!

I:Because the whole point of the project really is this beck, the Crowdundle Beck. Can you tell me how… clearly it’s absolutely crucial to the watermill but how important is the health of this beck to the operation of the mill?

P:The health of the beck downstream of the weir is of very little relevance really. The health of the bit that feeds the mill take-off is critical, it is the lifeblood of the mill. Without the river there is no mill and without the weir, or some suitable replacement for the weir, there is no mill.

I:It’s as important as that?

P:Oh it is, yes.

I:So could you just explain to me – I know we haven’t got a map in front of us – but in fairly simple terms the beck, the weir and the mill and how they all interact?

P:Certainly. I mean, the beck rises, as you probably know, near the top of Cross Fell, which is the highest land in England that isn’t in the Lake District. So it’s a fairly lively river, it picks up water very quickly. It weaves its way down through farmland into the Eden Valley and at a certain point somebody has built a weir across it which effectively dams a small pool of water. At the head of the weir there is a stone and concrete channel comes of it which leads into the headrace, or leat, for the mill. The idea is that the water goes down the weir and then down several rapids below the weir and the headrace runs along more or less level. So by the time the water gets to the mill the headrace is about 14 feet above river level and, as a physicist, we know that the energy that the mill has got available is the gravitational potential energy of that water being 14 feet up in the air. And the energy we have is by converting that into kinetic energy. So, in other words, the weight of the water pushes the wheel round.

I:So it’s absolutely essential that that channel of water is constant and is there for your mill to operate?

P:Yes. And it’s obviously critical that the weir survives to hold the water back to make it run down our bit rather than just running off into the Eden.

I:What’s the state of the weir now?

P:It is parlous. It is regarded as being quite fragile. Various changes to other things in the watercourse have dropped the water level at the foot of the weir and that has led to it being undercut. So the water splashes down and goes back under the rim of the weir. So there is a possibility that it might collapse. There’s also erosion into the trees and things on the sides of the weir and so there’s a possibility that the water could bypass the weir completely, all of which would be disastrous. We have our minds focussed by the fact that a National Trust mill in Cornwall called Cotehele has been out of action for, I think, now four years because their weir failed in a storm and people have been unable to agree how it’s going to be put back together. I have been reassured by the people in the Riverlands project here that they didn’t have our advantage of having a three-quarters prepared plan and a team of expert of people who already knew what the problems were. So that’s… we hope that puts us in a strong position.

I:And is there a plan as to what exactly happens with this weir now that you’re aware of?

P:Oh yes, there is because my Chief Engineer at the mill and I are on the project team for the Riverlands Crowdundle project and so we have been kept informed all along. The reason we’ve had to be involved, it’s quite complicated really. Had we still been part of the National Trust I guess we might not have had the same degree of involvement but because we’re effectively a client of the National Trust and they have to provide us with this service. And also that the weir is grade II* listed along with the mill, and I have to say that’s my fault because ten years ago there was a threat to try and replace our water extraction by putting a pipe further upstream and running it down to the mill take-off. We didn’t like this idea, partly because it’s not authentic, it’s nothing like what the original water supply would have been, and secondly because the river brings a lot of silt with it and if you’ve got a pipe, unless you’ve got some sort of trained mole to dig it out, it’s going to silt up very, very quickly. So I’m afraid I contacted Historic England and asked them to examine listing the weir. And they came back and they upped the listing on the mill from II to II* and included the water supply to the mill in the listing.

I:And that includes the weir then?

P:And that includes the weir. So it’s now protected.

I:When was the existing weir built?

P:That’s a matter of some speculation. It’s probably not that old. I mean, there’s a lot of milling history that we could go into here but because of some rather flawed science back in the 17th century, people built a lot of undershot mills which means the water goes under the wheel rather than over it. And it wasn’t… and it’s one of my favourite talking pieces this, that a Leeds-born engineer called John Smeaton, who I think designed the Eddystone Lighthouse among other things, did some proper experiments on waterwheels and proved that overshot wheels were the most efficient and that, of course, meant having your water higher up. So it’s quite possible that the weir was put in after 1765, 1760s I think it was, when he did his work. And maybe it coincided with the 1823 rebuild of the mill building itself.

I:The possibility that it was an undershot waterwheel before that?

P:Quite possibly, yes.

I:With the water going under the wheel?

P:Yeah. So they could have drawn it off lower in the river and still powered the mill from it. So maybe. It’s all maybes.

I:It’s a big puzzle, isn’t it, trying to unravel the history of this and trying to… How important is it – it seems to be very important to you – to preserve the history as authentically as you can?

P:My argument has always been… people have suggested pumped water for the mill and my argument for that is it destroys the story. The story that you sell to the visitors is that here is this piece of machinery that is working exactly as it has done for 200 years, or as it did 200 years ago. That it’s taking its water from a natural source, it’s just the sun drags it up into the sky and the rain puts it back down onto the top of the hills, and then it runs down the river and it powers our mill. So that’s all completely green, there’s no intervention at all apart from putting a little bit of barrier in the way of the river. And that seems to me to be very important. We’re producing a quality flour using nothing, basically.

I:Using nature, nature’s forces.

P:Using nature’s forces, yes.

I:So just going back to this weir again and the current project, I wonder if you could explain in layman’s terms then what the thinking is about what will happen?

P:The current thinking is that the weir will have to be removed and that a series of… I think the latest version they call them rapids, they have been called other things in previous… but a series of rapids and pools will be put in in its place. So the height of the crest of the weir will be retained and I have been known to say at the Riverlands meetings that I don’t care if you build it out of pink plastic unicorns below there so long as the weir crest water level is kept the same so we get the same water flow. It’s of very, very little interest once the water gets down our bit.

I:But that’s the challenge, presumably, for the Riverlands project?

P:It is, yes.

I:Is to do that.

P:And it’s not only a matter of replacing the weir, it’s a matter of helping wildlife. Because surveys have shown that there are more species below the weir than there are above it and the ones below include native English crayfish, lamprey, salmon, trout and various other things. Chub I think somebody said. And very few of these have got above the weir, about 20% of them, of the level of population. So it’s important from the wildlife point of view that the weir is replaced. And in many parts of Cumbria river authorities and Eden Rivers Trust and people like that are very proud of having breached weirs to allow better flow for their wildlife but it wouldn’t do for this one.

I:Could you explain to me again the significance of all those species being below the weir level?

P:That means they can’t get up it.

I:They can’t get up it?

P:Yeah.

I:Good thing, bad thing?

P:It’s a bad thing if you want these species to populate the river everywhere they can. They need to be able get up the weir. So all the designs that are acceptable make it much easier for wildlife to move upstream.

I:And from your point of view as long as there is something there that keeps that crest, the bit where the water comes over, and feeds the part that goes to the mill…?

P:Yes. I mean, the idea of the new design is that where we’ve got a weir which is perhaps four or five metres long so the water level goes down several feet over… I’m mixing my units but you know what I mean, over five metres, it’s going to do that over 60 metres. But, OK yeah, it may drop a couple of metres in five metres but it’s going to drop that distance, maybe a bit more because some of the river will have already gone down a bit beyond the weir. But it’s going to use 60 metres to produce a steady gradient for the creatures to go up and down. And that, of course, reduces the water velocity and the consulting engineers have modelled water velocity and found that it’s compatible with most of the wildlife, or all the wildlife that we’re concerned about. Eels, I forgot eels as well.

I:Eels are in there as well?

P:Yes.

I:How much of this wildlife do you see?

P:I’ve seen an eel a couple of times. We’ve had some visitors who spotted some trout in the shadows in the other side of the river. We know there are otter because there’s a mud bank that forms in our tailrace, that’s where the water runs back out from the wheel, from the waterwheel back into the river. We get a mud bank there and we get otter prints on it quite often. In my 17 years we’ve actually seen an otter twice. Kingfishers, there are a lot of… my wife used to spend a lot of her time when we weren’t milling, just turning the wheel, spend a lot of time out in the wheelhouse looking at the river, saw quite a lot of kingfisher action. Bust she noticed last week that in fact a lot of the branches that kingfishers might have used have fallen prey to nature and old age so if they’re around they must be somewhere else now.

I:And when you’re there and you’re working at the mill, how does it feel to you to be that close to the river and all this abundance of wildlife and everything that goes with it?

P:It’s great. The wildlife is fantastic. Treecreepers are one of the other things but they’re not river wildlife. And of course the swallows. The mill is packed with swallows in the summer and of course they like the fact that the river breeds a lot of insects. So that’s probably part of why they are there. We’ve also had all three of the main types of tit have been nesting in the mill and redstarts. So it’s a wonderful place, just the mill itself is a wonderful place for nature and I think a lot of the birds are attracted by the ready availability of flying insects from the water.

I:And I’m sure when visitors come, and you get hundreds of them, they appreciate the working environment but in such a beautiful setting.

P:Oh yes, indeed. Yes, it’s a lovely spot. It’s always been quite a restful place to be. It’s much less restful on Tuesdays, which is maintenance day, but when it’s just visitors and milling, as long as everything’s going well it’s quite a pleasant…

I:How does your working week operate? Tuesday is maintenance day…

P:Tuesday is maintenance day, Tuesday has been maintenance day for all of those 17 years. We decided we’d meet on a Tuesday and it sort of stuck ever since. So there’s been nine people in this morning, I think, but the biggest job has been attaching the new internal gearwheel to the axel so that we could start building a second waterwheel. So that piece of assembly, the big boys’ Meccano, has gone on today.

I:And that’s your current project, getting that second wheel?

P:That’s the current project is getting the second wheel going, yes. As well as maintaining the first waterwheel. So that’s been… the boards of the wheel have been in for about 12 years and they’re starting to rot so a few of those will be replaced over the winter.

I:And when you get a second wheel what difference will that make to the whole operation?

P:Initially none except it will be more like what it was in the days when it was a live mill and it will be visually very attractive because the two wheels go round in opposite directions. And it’s a stage towards being able to put something on the second wheel. Once the second wheel is built you can’t take its axel out again without dismantling it, therefore we’ve had to put the internal gearwheel on now before we build the waterwheel. We’ve also got some gears which will connect with that internal gearing but we don’t plan to put them on at the moment. We’ve just put the gearwheel there just so it’s there because if we hadn’t put it on now we wouldn’t have been able to put it on ever without taking everything to bits. As I’ve said, Tuesday is maintenance day so usually one of our volunteers comes in and she cleans, sweeps, dusts, empties the bin bags and things like that. Mostly it’s blokes on a Tuesday and we’ve got some very experienced engineers, some very skilled people and some very hard-working people. So anything from cleaning, dismantling and cleaning. When we stopped milling a couple of weeks ago for the winter we had to take all the woodwork off from around the stones, lift the stone and clean it and remove any mill moth larvae or eggs or anything that was stuck on the stone, because they get everywhere, they’re horrible things. And then parcel it all back up again so that mice and things can’t get in while we’re not looking. Then nothing much happens until the weekend and then through the National Trust opening period, March to October, we will try and have four volunteers in Saturdays and Sundays to run the mill, to sell flour, to talk to the customers, obviously to produce flour and to bag it, and to offer samples of home-baked products baked with the flour. We invite people to make donations for that. Yeah, that’s basically what we do. We open extra days for bank holidays, it gets quite challenging to turn out four people each day for a four-day bank holiday weekend.

I:How much of a challenge is it working in the voluntary sector? Or what are the advantages of it, for a start? Let’s be positive.

P:The hardest thing is getting enough people to volunteer and I think we’ve put people off in the past because they come and see things going on, like happened this morning, assembling this 650kg wheel onto an axel that weighs about a ton and a half, and they think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do that.’ But we don’t really need people who can do that, we need people who can actually concentrate and mill some flour or learn how to use their fingers deftly and bag the flour. Or just learn the words and run the mill and talk to the customers about it.

I:Just going back to this project now to get this second wheel going, you say you’ve put a gearwheel in which gives it the potential to operate.

P:Yes.

I:In your head, how would you like to see that develop in the future?

P:We keep getting asked if we could mill spelt, I’m reluctant to put spelt through the normal stones because it will be wasteful. Spelt is very expensive, it costs about 30-40% more than wheat. So if you think about it, if you stop milling wheat then the stones are full of partly milled wheat, so then you put spelt in and the next probably about six or seven bags of flour, eight bags of flour, will be mixed spelt and wheat and then eventually you get to something that you could sell as spelt. What do you do with those eight bags, that’s about 30 quid’s worth of turnover? So it would be quite difficult. Maybe if we could get some stones turning with that second wheel eventually we could mill some spelt with one of those. I think it’s more just to get it turning just to show but I’m sure it’ll be probably beyond my term of incumbency at the time we get to doing anything really serious with it.

I:Take me through the technicalities of how the two wheels work, given that you’ve explained that the water comes in on the top of wheel number one.

P:And on the top of number two. So we spent last winter extending the watercourse so it would drop the water over the second wheel as well and we’ve got effectively two different trapdoors in the watercourse that we can open independently. It’s not quite like that but that’s the idea. The one for the first wheel stops slightly short of the centre of the wheel and the one for the second wheel goes slightly past the centre so it pushes the wheels in opposite directions. Basically we’ve got a set of sluice gates that will control where the water goes and where it doesn’t.

I:So you are working with water all the time? You must have a very intimate relationship with it, really.

P:Oh yes. Yes, so it’s the equivalent of turning your mains on and off really. We do have to take great care to control it. If I can go back to the early days of our volunteering, we had not been doing it long, possibly 2009, and there was a major flood which destroyed and washed away the control gate up at the weir; ‘It’s probably in Carlisle somewhere,’ we used to say. So we had to rebuild that gate. Then you need to control the water near the mill because you can’t go walking half a mile just because you need to turn the water down a little bit. So there was always a board and a couple of sandbags when we started, and we built what we call the gate valve, which is a hinged structure that we can vary the proportion of water that goes to the mill and the proportion that we just spill back into the river. So that was, as I say, another development. Then, finally, there is a flap that falls out of the bottom of the wooden watercourse outside the mill called the launder. So the flap we call the dump valve and we can open that, and that’s what we do when we want to stop the mill. At the same time as the flap drops out of the bottom, a board comes as a barrier across the watercourse so it turns the water off positively when we finish milling for the day.

I:How much is that Victorian engineering that has been restored or is this new work that you’ve…

P:It’s all new, basically, it’s all stuff that we’ve designed. So the original dump valve was designed by the people who restored the watercourse back in 1995, which I think was the Northwest Mills Group. But we’ve redesigned it a bit since and we designed the gate valve and we built the current sluice gate as well.

I:So to some extent you’re part of a whole history of ingenuity of making this mill work with the river?

P:Yes, yes, that’s right. And the river is quite challenging. As I said, it comes from that very high ground and I have known it come up well over a foot during a milling day, possibly nearer to 18 inches, sorry 50cm. And even a few weeks ago it rose by possibly… I don’t know, what’s eight inches? 20cm during a milling day. If the river rises too much then the water comes back up the tailrace and the water wheel is then paddling in deep water. Normally it should be just the water that’s in it which it is chucking out underneath itself but if the river rises too far the boards of the wheel are pushing against water which is stationary in the wheel pit. So we then have to stop milling and we use what we call the high-tech depth gauge, which is a drainpipe that goes down into the tailrace and it has got a bracket on it, and we know that if the water reaches the top of the bracket we have to stop milling.

I:That’s extremely high tech.

P:Extremely high tech but it did it the other day. It started off below the bottom of the drainpipe and it ended up above the… so I only milled for two hours. Luckily the National Trust was closing anyway because of the gales that were forecast.

I:You must be at the mercy of the weather so much, depending on what the river is doing.

P:Oh we are, yes.

I:And it has really varied, hasn’t it, over the last couple of years.

P:Yes, as I say, it’s very lively. We usually get a period in June when it can be difficult to mill because there’s not enough water. In the years that we’ve been milling, which is back from 2011 onwards, there’s never been a time when we couldn’t mill at all but it’s been pretty close. You get to a point where it’s only the more experienced millers who can actually keep it going because it can get quite difficult. We always tell the customers that because it’s old and cranky like us.

I:Is it a worthwhile way to spend your time?

P:Oh yes. When you retire you can either sit around doing nothing or you can find something to do and it certainly counts as something to do. It’s been a second career. And of course it’s not only while I’m here that it involves me, obviously we have meetings that we have to run. As Production Manager I’ve got to try and source the grain to mill over the next season and that’s been a problem because the English harvest this year has been appalling. Most of the suppliers of grain have said there is no English wheat which is of suitable quality, or very little English wheat that is of suitable quality for milling into bread flour. Yeah, I was close to worrying about it when somebody from the Traditional Cornmillers Guild said he’d sourced a mix of Norfolk wheat and imported wheat that had the right protein level to make decent milling flour out of. So I’ve managed to put an order in for three tonnes. We mill about four tonnes a year so I’ve ordered three tonnes of that and we’ll just have to see how the rest of the year goes.

I:And that’s a mixture of wheat from Norfolk and imported?

P:Yes.

I:Do we know where from?

P:I don’t yet, I’ve asked but I don’t know where from. It’s mostly likely going to be either Poland or Canada I would have thought. Ukraine’s quite good as well but it’s a bit difficult to get it out of there at the moment.

I:It’s so fascinating, isn’t it? A small, naturally-powered watermill actually is still at the mercy of these massive global events, whether political or environmental.

P:Sure, yes.

I:And you’re right in the middle of it all.

P:Yes. We’re both political and environmental, really, because the day that Putin invaded Ukraine the price of our wheat went up from £550/tonne to £850, not because we were buying it from Ukraine but because the people who were buying it from Ukraine realised they had to buy it from somewhere else and bid for it on the British market. So it ended up costing us a lot of money.

I:So a small team of volunteer millers is at the whim of these big global events.

P:Yes, absolutely.

I:How does that make you feel?

P:Frustrated, but at least it gives us something else to think about. And it’s quite good that we’ve actually managed to soldier on. As I said before, we were all National Trust volunteers until 2020. In 2020 the National Trust didn’t allow any volunteers anywhere near the property so we couldn’t do anything for a year, or for most of a year, which was disappointing because there were 53 bags of freshly milled flour and people were crying out for flour but we couldn’t get to it. Yes, it was getting near the end of its lifetime by the time we did get back in. There was also some unmilled grain which we also had to chuck away at the end. But then came the blow that the National Trust said, ‘Well, we’re not going to reopen the mill after lockdown.’ We scratched around trying to say, ‘Well, could we do things to help like buy some wheat and not claim expenses and things like that?’ One of the volunteers said, ‘Why mess about? Why not see if we can lease it?’ And we asked if we could lease it and, to our astonishment, they came back and said, ‘Yes, alright then.’ And there became a process of generating the lease, deciding what the terms were going to be, but we were allowed back in before it was signed, fortunately. Because after it was less than a year of being locked out, our beautiful cobbled yard that was all done by volunteers was four feet high in weeds. The machinery had slumped because it’s all held together by wooden wedges and if you don’t keep doing things to it it will get out of alignment. And there were mill moths and mice absolutely everywhere. So it took quite a bit of work to knock it back into shape and I really do think if it had been left another year it would not have been retrievable by us so that would have been it. You’d have been into a £100,000 job for a millwright to sort it.

I:And that again underlines the importance of keeping the thing going all the time.

P:Yes.

I:Maintained, used, working.

P:Any bit of machinery, if you leave it it will just disintegrate, basically. If you’re using it, it’s not that it’s not disintegrating, it’s just that you notice and you keep doing things to keep it going. So it’s much preferable. I hate to see museum machinery. I nearly got thrown out of Snowshill Manor Museum in the Cotswolds because they’ve got these beautiful multipoint locks on old chests. You turn the key and all these 17 levers go out into slots and I couldn’t resist trying to turn the key to see what would happen and I got thrown out. I wouldn’t dream of putting a thing like that in a museum without putting a model of it so you could see how it worked. There we go, that’s me.

I:What about you personally? How long will you continue in these three very important roles?

P:As long as I can. I enjoy it, I like the job, I like the company, I love the mill. And, yeah, it makes you feel you’re doing something important, I think. It’s not just going to the darts club or whatever, it is actually performing a public service to some extent. My wife does it as well, of course, she’s our champion flour bagger. Bagging flour is not as easy as it looks; to actually make a tidy bag that is going to look good on the shelf actually requires quite a lot of attention to detail. We’ve got a few people who can do it and a few people who are worse at it and I refuse to put myself on the list of baggers because I know I can’t do it.

I:What are the particular skills you need to bag flour?

P:As I say, attention to detail and probably thin fingers is a great help because you’ve got to fold the top of the bag very tidily and then get a sticky label on it.

I:I imagine a lot of the bags of flour that I, for example, might buy in a supermarket have been bagged by a machine.

P:Oh yes, yes.

I:So tell me what the Acorn Bank flour looks like and feels like when it’s in a bag.

P:It looks smart when it’s done properly. They look as good as the machine-bagged ones from the shop. Yes, they’ve got to be neat and tidy. The bag hasn’t to be squashed because if you don’t do it right you end up with the bottom of the bag, it’s all sort of wrinkled underneath. So, yes, there are various just little things that you need to do. Just, as I say, paying attention, concentrate.

I:They certainly look good, those bags of flour.

P:They do, yes. Peter, the volunteer who has been with us second longest, I think, and my wife Glenys, organise the way of doing bagging properly and they can both do it very well. As I say, I can’t do it at all.

I:And hopefully they can pass that on to others.

P:Oh we’ve trained other people, yes. There are a lot of people who can do it well, a lot of people who do it well. As I say, it’s the lifeblood of the mill, it’s absolutely essential to us. We are very pleased that we are involved in the Riverlands project and that the II* listing has put a red line on there. There’s basically two red lines on the project, one is the flow of water to the mill and one is the access for wildlife. If we hadn’t got it listed there might only be one.

I:So you feel confident that whatever happens the mill is secure?

P:From that point of view certainly, yes, yes. I think we should do… it should be OK.