The date on the grind stone is 1666 when it was a corn mill. In he 16 th century it was unable to cope with milling all the estates corn and was made into a sawmill. The narrow archway below is where the water wheel pit is. Unfortunately they don’t state what diameter of the wheel is, but it looks about 12 feet and is overshot. The wheel was turning and working a vertical and circular saw on two separate benches. It’s one of the most delightful old mills that we have seen, so far.This ancient Oak Tree was dead, except for one branch in full leaf!
This little ‘ Hansel and Gretel’ type cottage was in fact called the Slaughterhouse, but was only used for butchering the deer carcasses, then drying and storing some of the meat upstairs. What appeared to be two cottages with beautiful arched doorways were the old kennels where the hunting hounds were kept. We thought that these old rustic buildings were more interesting just because they were not grand and symmetrical. On peering through the window I could see it was used for storing things.There were five mangles with wooden rollers, just like one that my Granny had. She allowed me to turn the handle and the cogs clanked together, making a sound just like winding up the lock paddles today.The fallow deer wander everywhere and were quite used to mixing with the human gongoozlers, even in the ice-cream queue.
There were plenty of benches for picnics, and tree trunks left especially for children to climb and play on. They could also build dens with the smaller branches that were lying around. We enjoyed our visit so much we went back several times, the ice-cream was good too.
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