I went to visit Buck Mill some time before we made the Time Team programme. I don't normally do this - I suppose I prefer to have a clean (empty?) mind when we start, without any preconceptions - but Stoke Trister is in Somerset so I have more than the usual interest in it. On my visit I was struck by the earthworks downstream from the mill site. These only made sense to me as the leat and overflow channel of another mill site, though the actual position of the building on the ground was not obvious. I thought it would be useful, without discussion before hand, if Stewart (Ainsworth) could look at the earthworks and see if he came to the same conclusions as me.
Mills have always interested me. My father used to take me round as a small boy to visit wind and water mills whenever we came across them. I could have turned into a mechanical geek but I am not good with technology so it was not the gears and cogs that impressed me. No, rather more, it was the realization that mills are some of the earliest machines that were ever devised. For the first time, difficult and energy or time consuming tasks were performed using water power (and later in the 12th century, wind power) rather than the muscle power of animals or people.
Once cereals had become a dominant part of the diet, the grains needed to be crushed to release the powdery flour so that it could be made into bread. For thousands of years this was done by hand, laborious work on saddle querns or later rotary querns. But to get water to do this work was a momentous step and the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Buck Mill was a water mill powered by a leat bringing water to the top of a vertical wheel, which then, by gearing, transferred the power to the pairs of large stones which ground the flour. In earlier times, using a simpler technology, water was led to horizontal wheels with paddles, much like modern turbines. These could transfer the power directly to smaller stones without the elaborate gearing. There must have been a great many of these small horizontal mills in England before the bigger, more elaborate mills with vertical wheels, gears and complicated leat systems were built. These would have required much more engineering skill and considerable investment.
At Buck Mill, I thought from the earthworks that we might find a horizontal mill, and indeed, Stewart thought the same. We did not manage to uncover the mill site, but we are sure it is still there - perhaps a final trench might have located it - but it was always going to be very ephemeral and difficult to find.
We have experts of one sort or another on every programme. Often we don't give these people enough credit, I feel, for the great knowledge they possess which we tap into. At Buck Mill, for example, we had Martin Watts, an acknowledged expert on mills, on hand to advise us about mill matters for the three days. His specialist expertise enabled us to interpret the changes that had taken place to the mill. After Phil had cleared the rear wall of the wheel pit, and shown that it had several phases, it was Martin who pointed out that considerable modification had taken place. The inflow of water along the leat had been raised and restricted to a narrower channel enabling the mill wheel to be replaced by a narrower, larger wheel. But it was only when Martin indicated that these changes would make the mill more efficient, giving greater power, that the full significance of the changes uncovered in the excavation could be appreciated.
