Notes on watermills:

 

Water wheels appear to have been invented by the Ancient Greeks. Watermills were introduced into Britain during the Roman era and the Domesday Book mentions that about 5,624 of them existed at that time. It is thought that during their heyday about 27,000 water mills operated in Britain.  Even a river as short as the Ystrad (about 10 miles) had at least seven mills along its its course - Felin Hen, Felin Newydd, Felin Segrwyd, Pandy Mill, Kings Mill, Felin Ganol and Brookhouse Mill.  According to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings there were 60 working commercial mills in the UK in 1997. Mills were used for many purposes, e.g. cotton and paper production, cloth-fulling ("pandy" mills in Wales), and powering of bellows in iron mills, in addition to grinding flour for food and animal fodder. Over time the grinding of flour for human use was taken over by large roller mills and the remaining water mills concentrated mainly on producing animal food, as was the case in Segrwyd Mill.

 

There are three main types of water wheels:  (i) overshot wheels in which the water entered at the top of the wheel, (ii) undershot wheels in which the water hits the wheel at its lowest point and (iii) breast wheels in which water enters at about axle level. Overshot wheels rotate in anti-clockwise direction and undershot and breast wheels rotate in a clockwise direction, although an uncommon modification of the breast wheel, known as the pitch back wheel, also rotates in an anti-clockwise manner. The arrangement of the water courses that powered the mills depended on the mill’s exact location and the surrounding terrain. In some mills the river ran directly into the wheel. More commonly, the water was stored in a millpond as this allowed better control of the water supply. Tide mills used the power of the tides to drive the water wheels and were obviously less dependent on rainfall.

 

The grinding machinery in all flourmills is surprisingly similar to each other and has probably changed little over hundreds of years.  A pit wheel, directly attached to the water wheel, is linked through a series of gears to the main shaft, which runs up through all storeys of the mill. From this shaft other series of wheels and gears drive the millstones and related machinery. The miller poured the grain into a hopper, situated above the rotating mill stones, from where it entered a feed shoe which was shaken by a “damsel’ to ensure even entry into the stones. In Segrwyd Mill many of the smaller wheels had wooden cogs (usually holly), which could be conveniently replaced as they wore out. The larger wheels were of cast iron. The flour, which is surprisingly warm after being ground, dropped into a meal bin where it cooled and was transferred to sacks and weighed before being returned to the farmers. Mills grinding flour for food also contained a cylindrical sieve, also driven by the mill machinery, that separated the flour from the wheat chaff.  Segrwyd Mill originally had two of these units but they have been lost.