New uses for old mills and farms

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/06/mills-farms-renewable-energy-contemporary-art

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In the hamlet of Cole, part of the valley parish of Pitcombe, south-west of Bruton, the river Pitt joins the larger Brue. For centuries these rivers have fed two mills here, though the mills’ uses have evolved across the centuries to meet changing needs and markets.

Domesday records two mills in the valley, one of them almost certainly the original of Gants Mill, which was a fulling mill serving the woollen industry until, in the 19th century, a brief silk boom created new demands – and employment for 200 women and girls. By 1856, it was grinding animal feed for local farms, as milk, bacon and cheese became the region’s prime products. The much smaller mill at Cole had been producing edge tools when, in 1798, a sale notice claimed that the property might suit “any person acquainted with the manufacturing line where water is required”. Between 1811 and 1950 it ground flour.

Now, in 2014, continuing the long, local tradition of imaginative reinvention to suit the times, at both mills the infinitely renewable flow of water through the valleys generates electricity as part of the South Somerset hydropower project.

At Gants mill, the seventh generation miller in her family (though the first, she claims, to be also a chartered accountant), told me how nowadays, each summer weekend, the otherwise silent, unchanging, steep-sided valley, where the mill-race has run for so long, is alive with cheerful sound (recently that of a steel band) and peopled by wedding parties.

Over at Cole, where the streams now wind through beautifully landscaped gardens beside welcoming buildings of honey-coloured stone, a sophisticated cross-flow turbine puts the Pitt to modern use, supplying the property with power, and passing any surplus to the grid.

Our farms reinvent themselves too; familiar fields host solar panels rather than cattle, and Bruton’s Durslade Farm (where I remember mother and son farming some 50 years ago with a small dairy herd and a few hens) is now an internationally celebrated centre for the exhibition of contemporary artworks.