Shelsley Watermill - X

We split into three pairs today and made an impression on the work.

One pair used the borrowed JCB to remove the stump of the laurel bush that used to overhang the front door of the mill. This laurel proved to be actually two bushes and they were both extremely tenacious. Some judicious digging and the appliance of a considerable amount of brute force did the trick in the end.

The second pair started to tackle the side of the culvert. Every time we look at this job we cringe. Somehow we have to support the brick built barrel roof of the culvert while we hack away the side nearest the mill, insert some sort of lintel and then make it all good and secure.

Passing builders have made comments like “Just use needles, it’ll be OK” and we are sure that they are right, but…

At least we now have a team member with some building experience who seems to understand about needles, basically scaffold poles inserted through holes knocked in the brickwork and taking the weight of the structure above while the structure below is knocked out and replaced. To us non-builders it still sounds dodgy but we will see.

The final pairing worked inside the mill trying to free off one of the stone nuts and the PTO gear so that when we do try to turn the wheel we won’t be trying to turn the whole works.

The stone nut is the gear wheel that takes the drive from the great spur wheel to a grindstone. They are intended to be able to be lifted up so that they no longer engage with the teeth on the great spur gear. One was left disengaged when the mill fell into disuse but the other is firmly on its boss with 80 or so years of rust holding it firm.

It’s still in place but soaking in penetrating fluid so it may move when we next try to shift it.

We had more luck with the PTO shaft and were able to leave this evening knowing that we can disengage and remove the whole shaft when we need to.

The Mill Society now has its own website, and this blog will transfer to www.shelsleywatermill.com in the near future. There will probably be a short period when postings appear in both places but I will soon get bored with doing this twice.

Shelsley Watermill - IX

Work on the bearing plinth and the tailrace continued on Tuesday. John worked hard at laying the final layer of brick paving on the plinth while the rest of us worked on building a retaining wall for the side of the tailrace.

The retaining wall will not be visible when the tailrace is covered over again so we are using concrete blocks as well as bricks. Once the walls are made good we can start removing the side of the culvert to provide a full opening to the stream. We already know that the opening we already have can take the flow from the sluice but we need to ensure that the side of the culvert is secure.

At some point in the past the roof of the culvert was supported on a steel beam. We don’t know how long ago that beam was put in but it has been in a damp atmosphere above the stream and is now a large block of rust without much strength. It has to make sense to replace this beam while we have to culvert accessible to avoid dealing with a cave in at some point in the future.

Less physical, but just as interesting, I spent the evening at a meeting of the Teme Valley Historical Society listening to Mark Joseland of the MAC giving a talk on the history of the hillclimb. When the talk was over I took the opportunity of appealing to the members for any information they might have about the mill and the surrounding area. As a result I now have a diary page full of names to contact.

Shelsley Watermill - VIII

Well back up to strength today as you can see from the photo. Clockwise from the top left we had Martin, Max, John, Colin, John and yours truly. Guess what, we were shovelling mud again!

The wheel bearing plinth has now been filled with concrete and will be brick paved when everything has fully cured. The builders working on the farmyard lent us a cement mixer that saved us a lot of work, with about a cubic yard of concrete to be mixed and hauled down to the wheel pit. We are really getting good at this bucket chain lark.

We have also started to build back up in the tailrace. The retaining wall for the race on the side nearest the mill had almost completely disappeared so we have now created a foundation for a new wall. Again this needs to be left to set, so we set up another bucket chain (I said we were getting good) from inside the mill to clear yet more mud and rubble from around the machinery space.

One oddity that turned up was a small earthenware bottle, maybe a ¼ pint sized, clearly stamped CARLESS & HILES, VETY. SURGEONS, WORCESTER. When it is cleaned up I will try to photograph it and post a picture. We can only presume that it was tossed into the mill as a piece of rubbish.

Photography inside the mill is a bit tricky because of the lack of light but sometimes the sun is in just the right place. Somehow the old billycan seems to sum up what happened to this old mill, just left behind…

Shelsley Watermill - VII

There were only two of us working on the mill this morning but the work was significant because we were actually building something up instead of just cleaning and cutting down.

Only a few courses of bricks, the facing for the bearing plinth under the outer end of the wheel, but they were just as tricky to lay as we expected. At one point John had his head through one gap between the spokes and his arms through two different spaces between other spokes just laying one brick. The comment when I admitted I had not got a camera was something like “Oh good” but just a touch more earthy.

On the subject of cameras and photographs, I have put all the watermill pictures that I have on PicasaWeb,the new web based photo album from Google. I think every picture has a caption, but I can’t promise that all the captions make sense.

Hopefully we will be back up to numbers on Thursday because the next job is to mix and pour concrete behind the wall that John built today to complete the base for the bearing. Once that has set we should be able to jack the wheel up into position and maybe, just maybe, get it to turn. Then we will be able to start restoring the buckets on the wheel. That really will be a significant milestone!

Historical Research - Shelsley Watermill

Normally I would have spent Thursday at the mill but I would have been on my own yesterday so I went to the Worcester Records Office to see if I could find a little more history for the mill.

I’ve never tried to do any sort of historical research before but the staff at the centre were very helpful and showed me the basics of searching for records.

I can’t claim to have found out much about the mill itself because I didn’t find a single direct reference to it but I had an interesting day in the archives. I now know that the rector of St Andrews Church had a battle with the Inland Revenue in 1898 about Land Tax on the church glebe lands. Civil servants had good handwriting in those days before typewriters but the same cannot be said of all the correspondence I tried to read.

A surprising discovery was that there was a World War I German soldier buried in Shelsley Walsh churchyard. I found this from the exhumation order authorising the removal of this soldier to the German Cemetery at Cannock. Amongst the papers I found the soldiers name, Ernst Altmann, and the date of his death, 25th December 1918. No reference to rank, what he was doing in Shelsley Walsh or what he died of. I would guess that he was a POW doing farm work and that he died in the influenza epidemic that swept through the country. You have to feel sorry for him, dying far from home and on Christmas Day as well. Perhaps his story could make a background history page for the mill website. I must find out more!

What I do have from a single day’s research is a list of further references to follow up, especially the names of the landowners. As the mill seems to be part of the farm rather than a separate business the best hope for finding dates for major changes to the mill is in the farm accounts and records. I think the Records Office staff are going to get used to my face. Even a tiny parish like Shelsley Walsh has a lot of records.

Shelsley Watermill - VI

Another satisfying day working on the mill. Only four of us today as we pensioners take advantage of the late summer holiday offers and disappear to various destinations.

One pair spent the day digging mud and rubbish out of the gear-wheel pit inside the mill. The first sight of some of the brickwork inside the building is a bit scary, but it hasn’t fallen down yet! Working space in this pit is very cramped and I was grateful for my hard-hat on a number of occasions (every time I moved) when I ventured in to see what they had been up to. Some major timbers will need some TLC as well, and there are signs that damp penetration into the timber was always a problem.

At least the pit now drains freely to the outside world, which should slow down the deterioration a bit. The gear is now free to turn when we have re-mounted the wheel on its bearings.

The second pair working today concentrated on the base for the outside wheel bearing. All the rotten brickwork has been removed back to a sound foundation ready to start building the plinth back up.

As we had a few thousand gallons of water handy, washing the brickwork down was easy and spectacular even if we do have a puddle behind the plinth. As with everything else about the mill we had numerous discussions about the best way forward. Not because we don’t know what we are doing but so we can have a bit of a rest and get our breath back.

Shelsley Watermill - V

Another day at the mill. There were six of us today, enough to make some good progress.

We are now able to divert water from the feeder stream into the headstock and can test the plumbing. Just looking at the pipework and working out the probable flow rate is not the same as seeing water flow. And how it flows! The layer of silt in the bottom of the tailrace was yards downstream in a matter of seconds.

We had made sure that the wheel would not turn before we opened the gate valve because the whole end bearing is missing and has been for nearly 50 years. There is a bearing at the other end of the wheel shaft, so we know what we have to make. Nothing complicated, fortunately.


How to rebuild the plinth supporting the outer bearing is a bit more complicated though. Now we have cleared a lot of mud away we can see how decayed the old brickwork is. To knock out the old brickwork and build it back up with good bricks is the only thing to do. Trouble is, the wheel is in the way and we can't move the wheel because the bearing is missing. It's going to be a fiddly job for our only member with bricklaying experience, but I'm sure we will all stand by and offer encouragement.

The coming weekend will see the hill-climb in active use and the Mill Society is hoping to gain some publicity (and donations) from the spectators. It will be a while yet before we can offer tours of a working mill, but a start has been made.

Shelsley Watermill - IV

We had some good news today from the watermill experts. They say the mill is worth restoring! I'd hate to think we had dug all that mud out for nothing.

They also told us that the wheel was cast by Turtons of Kidderminster, probably after 1878, but that the interior workings of the mill were much earlier, probably 1700-1720 and were very high quality.

Work continued today to clear the tail-race and the culvert. Those of us who are not claustrophobic took turns to dig silt and rubble from the floor of the culvert. Not a job any of could do for too long as it was a bit cramped as you can see.

We are still hearing snippets of history about the mill from former farm workers and others. The more we learn the more we realize how cleverly laid out the mill and farm buildings were. The mill stream is hidden in a culvert for most of it's length, but is open were it crosses the end of the yard by the old stables for the heavy horses. A self filling horse trough!

There was a power take-off from the waterwheel that ran a line-shaft through the stable loft to power the chaff cutter and other machinery for preparing fodder for the horses, all part of the same self sufficiency. If we wanted to be all ecological and green today we could do no better than this set-up from 150 years ago.