The Domesday Mill (Dotton, Devon) | Series 14 Episode 9 | Time Team

Are we excited about another building? We already have the

mill

there. Well, we have a building shown here on the map that uses the natural slope of the land and slopes down to the

mill

. creek, so are we looking at another mill, another mill? Well in my experience it's quite usual to have the crossing point on the downstream side of the mill which would fit very well in this case so we came for a meal maybe we'll get two you know maybe we'll even get three well , that would be good, we won't know until tomorrow, start of the second day here at Dotton in East Devon, we had a good day yesterday, it was good wasn't it?

We've come a long way with We found the most recent phase of the mill there and Phil and Naomi are going to continue digging, but yesterday afternoon you started developing this theory that there could be another mill here on this slope somewhere, what is it? the evidence of that well? a building shown on the tithe map anyway in 1842, yes, but you see there are a lot of patch marks in the grass, yes, where the grass has died on the top of probably the walls below, so we did some geophysics here and clearly there is something going on.

Okay, there may be buildings there, doesn't mean it's a mill, well it's a strange place to put a house or farm buildings. You imagine that if we went up this whole slope it would be very inconvenient, so why would it be? a good place to put a mill, let me show you on a diagram, look, we have the headway at the bottom of the slope, then we have the elevation of the land and if you build a mill across that slope that way there are certain advantages: you can have the mill wheel in the hole like that and drive the mill machinery, but you can actually take the corn to the upper level directly to the top of the building, but it's still just a theory, yes it is necessary.

Testing How do we test it? I think what we do is dig a trench from where the lead is at the bottom of this slope to the crop marks where the geophysics represents things. If we find a wheel hole there we will know that You are right and there was a mill, but if it goes straight to the buildings we will know that it was a bad idea and there was no mill here, so it should be pretty easy to try this new trench, it is right here, through the elite. and on the edge of a building that appears both in patch marks and on a 19th century map, if we find a wheel pit we have another mill, if so it is most likely older than the one in phil's trench on the main site we have two trenches in the domestic area we have several internal walls at one end we are going deeper into the outside of the building at the other end of the building phil is also getting much deeper in this photograph of the mill us It's helping to make sense of the archeology that we're in here, but at a higher level, and if you look to the other side, here's the axle with the main wheel and you can see that it's at ground level, which in would actually fit into that kind of indentation and the brick now, if you cross it, that goes towards that wall that will be our wall on the other side of this behind the planks on the left side, that's correct if you compare the level it's on the wheel. uh, the axis crosses and the level of the windows that are right up here, so these are right on the other side of here, that's correct, in other words, that suggests that the floor level will have to be down here, which suggests that down here, just as it was picked up in geophysics, there is actually an underground room, if you like, where the mill equipment would have been, which will be underneath, yes, yes, that seems feasible to you, Mike, yes, I think that I think that's very good.

Nick, but what I think we need to do first is get into the wheel well and pull it back towards the road, why do we have to do it right? I think what we should look for in the wheel well is to go up a little bit on the back of the bottom of the wheel, what do you mean? Well, we're looking at a mini drop, maybe a foot and two feet high, which would increase the head and the efficiency of the water so that as the water comes, it's a little bit higher than the bottom of the yeah, fact, now if we can find that, that will give us not only what type of wheel we have in detail, but I think it will also help us a little bit. the date, so what would be the date of that type of structure?

Well, it should be before the 16th century. Just a couple of miles away is Otterton Mill. It is still a working mill that grinds corn once a week. It's interesting, it shows me how much. This process changed people's lives. Martin said he estimated it would take us about half an hour to grind this small batch by hand. In fact, Matt did it and it took him two hours, which would have taken a watermill just a couple of minutes. In a mill like this, how does it work well? The water wheel is mounted on a central shaft or shaft that goes through the wall into the mill and brings the power directly to the part where you need it to drive the millstone here, yeah, oh yeah.

I can see the shaft that goes through there, yeah, that's right, Tony, and the main gear turns in a hole at the bottom and that's the feature that we're looking for in the millet point so that the gear that goes in that direction then it is transferred to this one and the energy goes up there, that's right, and this drives the millstones that are on the floor above, so the energy goes up here, yes, it does, it's turning the millstone top which is rotated from below and then you can see the hopper above the millstones where the grain is fed by gravity into a hole through the top millstone and what happens to the coil once it is ground well , it comes out inside the box and then there's only one place it can go and that's down the spout to the floor below, so We have to go back down, actually yes, you stay fit in milk.

Oh, and here's the finished product going down the chute. Yeah, how long do you think it would take to fill that sack? Apparently it takes about a quarter of an hour. It's beautiful, isn't it back on the site? Our search for what could be a former mill is not going well. Helen and Bridge have found very little. There really are some pieces of marijuana, but it all looks like a garbage dump to them. It's not simple, it would be nice to know if we're looking at an area where there's possibly older material floating around rather than these being the first features.

Yes, I would like to know if this is a primary garbage dump or someone's. just clearing another garbage dump in a secondary way in something else, if there is a previous mill in this field, it has to be against the edge of the elite, so we bubble along the wire to see if we can pick up any structure. just to see him in his trench phil has another wall is that i think it could be fun well yeah oh brilliant stoner crows that follow the shape of the waterwheel oh we've done it yes there's a wall there's a big wall that's special, that's where enter at a higher level, enter at a higher level, whether at the top or in the middle of the wheel, well, they vindicated you that back a little bit you said you wanted to see.

Did you say it was critical? I did and it's that this wall is the same height as the side wall which means Mike's original thought was wrong. most efficient system on one side of the wheel pit, we came across a large piece of stone and I took a look at it, where should the middle be? Somewhere, we are practically outside the cameraman's waist in the rubble, it is curving. It's definitely curving in every way, isn't it? There is no hole in the middle ah, what is that? something in the middle a hole a hole in the middle what's round in a windmill with a hole in the middle a pole oh you mean All this is the hole, so it's been blocked.

Wow, I mean, that's hollow, that's a puzzle, you might say. I wonder if we should bring the machine to clean the top here so we can see it really well, Phil, I think you. Actually, we're probably right in the domestic part of the building. We've been looking for household items that might give us some dates and sure enough, we have a collection of them, so these are the things from this trench here and I really want your opinion on the dates, John, if you can, this, for example, early 19th century Staffordshire pottery, all this white earthenware, right, there's another example there, so that all goes with mill life in the 19th century and these are very. probably from Bridgewater, this red land and we're told you've known about it since your Summerslam days, so we've got a little bit of stuff going on here, going all the way back to the 18th century.

It could well be before that, but as we get to this end of the tray there are previous things this is a trail where the first half of the 18th century I finished with this last piece now it's a cut edge, isn't it? It's a bit of modern glass, although it's not actually a window. antique window glass and this um is from a diamond pain 17 probably from the early 18th century, but it's not really nice, what's up with that piece? That piece came from much further down in that, yes, that's good because it is an earlier earthenware with laces on the legs. from the late 16th century and early 17th century and what is typical of them is that they look dull in this type of period, most of the pottery is unadorned but it dates back to the 16th century so there are indications that we might have things on site from ago As far as that goes, yes that's good, the fines also take us back to the 1600s, as does the elite date, but the first mention of a mill in Dotton was here in the book of the end of the world.

It is an invaluable record of England in 1086. It lists all land and livestock and was drawn up to allow William the Conqueror to collect dues from him in the form of taxes. What does it say? However, about Dotton tells us that the area paid taxes for one land gate and three. furlong I'm not even going to ask you what a gate is, let's move on, it's just a very small area, okay, very small area and there was land for two plows with one and a half plows in there, how can you have half a plow? It's entirely possible that they were using half a plow of someone else's borrowed money and therefore adding up to half a plow and a slave and a slave, but there was also the mill that paid five shillings taxed, um, that's right, and the whole area it was actually valued at Seven shillings, you've got a dotted mill here that's worth five shillings and then you've got all this land over here and that's only worth another two shillings.

Yes, so the mill is actually the most valuable part of this unit of land. Phil now has his millstone and it's a beauty, but can Martin date it? It looks to me like there could be four, three or four slots coming out of the central one down here, one here, can we clean it up a little bit and just take a look at it or am I doing? this up, I think we have it, so that would be good, I think we have what is a slot there, yeah, I think we have, I think this is, I think there's another one there, oh, yeah, so you have four holes, that It's what's coming. out of it, which have been filled in, that's really brilliant, yes there is, so it's a top stone and the curved shape of those, oh, that's excellent, Phil, the curved shape of those certainly pushes the date of This goes back, I mean, this is a 17th and 18th century. millstone, I'd say it fits in with some of the ceramics we've been looking at.

Surely look, it's not a strange shape. The key is in this part in the middle. The shape of this stone dates back to about the 17th century. They are all starting to come together now we have the floor of the domestic part of the mill building it is also a beauty this was probably the kitchen floor we decided to lift a section to see if we can see signs of any previous flooring along the path in the another field helen and the bridge are blank they have found the continuation of the elite this wall is a border but there is no sign of a wheel pit and the building does not appear to be attached to the elite it does not look like a former mill and the quotes are A problem, it's before, during or after, but we don't know what the devil's job was yesterday to get close to this wall, right?

But now you've cleaned it up and it looks great, I'm really glad I did that too, I mean when I got here the first thing I noticed was that these bricks here are actually broken and I was a little discouraged because they're the exact same day and age. like that wall on the other side, but then as I was going down I realized that it actually zigzags down in a kind of V shape and it moves up here and then it levels out there and I realized that it was just a big botched repair job and underneath all this is good stone masonry and that stone work I think comes first and it actually lags behind and therefore it has to be before that brick work, what did? writes martin yes, I think that is absolutely true, phil, I think this is where the water and the action of the water wheel has eroded the wall, the stone of the wall and it has been patched with bricks, so what do you think of that older part, what kind of dating wellFrom the other evidence we've had, I guess from the 17th to the 18th century, well that's great, that goes back the history of the mill to about 350 years, doesn't it?

But I think we have a chance to pick it up even more than that, how cool, if we can take a look under the floor of this wheel pit, there may be some evidence underneath of previous structures because this elite and this waterway have been in use. for a long

time

, as you see down here, I've already had a little push around this hole here it was actually made by the wheel and look, you can actually see look oh wow oh it's a big piece of wood which is interesting, right? Hmm, can you wait for that?

Well, that gives them something. chase tomorrow, isn't it? In fact it's day three in our search for an Early Mill at Dotton in Devon late yesterday Phil found an intriguing piece of wood oh wow that's interesting isn't it? Hmm, can you wait for that? But what is this? This is a piece of the water wheel, it is the edge, how is it made? You know, look, you have a really nice curve there and we have a piece of wood here that I think is part of the base of the petal and what are these lumpy pieces?

Well, we have pieces of pins. to keep the paddles in place, but do you know the water would have looked like this? I do it because we have this very nice photograph from the late 19th century that is misleading and shows us the edge of the water wheel, so this is actually part of that wheel being a fragment from there late 19th century late 19th century XIX judging by the guy in the flat cap late 19th century doesn't really sound like much, but it was actually 150 years ago, he's practically not in his trench. Phil started to dig, but there's a problem there's more wood but there also appears to be concrete this is confusing to Mike because there's actually a piece of wood this wood is going in right under the concrete underneath the concrete and yet it's taking up this hole in the concrete and it's visible to everyone, so we have concrete, I'm not sure if I don't have concrete right down there.

Could it be stone in the lower field instead of concrete? An earlier wheel well lining. it could be because if you have wood under the concrete, that could mean that we have a previous structure for the wheel to fit in, yes, but then you see that if this concrete is placed directly on it, it could actually be glued to it. I guess the concrete will have to rise one way or another at the other end of the mill building. We have already crossed the floor of the domestic area, but there is nothing dateable or other characteristics that this trench has given us. walls, we start tracing them to see if we can understand how this building worked on the inside.

The last mill on this site was demolished only 30 years ago, so there are still quite a few people who remember it and saw it in operation. I can remember, you know, the old mill with the flower, all the farmers, the tenant farmers brought their corn there. I can remember milk working, yes, when I worked on the farm, what the farmer prepared ground milk during the war for a farmer. I remember coming to the mill with my grandfather on his pony and his trap and bringing corn and bringing a flower and things like that, what was the middle?

Well he was short talk and always covered in white flowers, he really was a Dusty Miller, yes, yes he was. You've researched your family well, that's right, and this lady's family worked in the mill in the 1840s. My great-great-grandfather, he was a Miller here for 50 years. His name was Joel Roger Carter. This is his daughter. my middle daughter, Anna, and she is my great-great-grandmother, was born in Dotton Mill, Joel Carter, the miller, was quite the musician, he played the cornet, he used to go up into the hills above the mill to play and you could hear the music all over the place. world.

Valley for a couple of days Stuart has been looking at likely locations for other mills around the site. It is increasingly clear that there is really only one place where the mill could have been. What you need to be able to do is manage the flow of water very, very carefully and what they've done here at dotted is manage the river in a very specific way by building a dam across the river here that then allows the water to flow. down in a ditch they dig a ditch down here the water flows down turns the mill wheel and then the water just goes back to the river down here.

One thing to point out is the road which I think has been forgotten in all the searching we have when you say the road which is our little country road that is absolutely critical for the sighting it is the only crossing of this valley in the parish what you need with a mill is not only the water to turn the wheel but you also need to deliver the corn to be ground and you need to remove the flour so that the conditions are absolutely perfect for the mill right at that point, does that mean that where Dot and Mill are now is the prime site for a mill and no one would have built one anywhere else?

I think that is exactly the case. I firmly believe that beneath the mill Phil's excavation will be evidence of the earliest food at the site. He is in exactly the position he should be in to be efficient on the field down the road. Helen's search for a former mill has come to an end. She was looking for signs of a wheel pit, but there is none. She now finds that most of the elite are running from Phil's trench across the field she has been working in, but there is no sign of any building that could be a mill and no sign of any structure.

Aside from what was probably a house, we have dug two holes in search of a previous meal at this site and I think what we have proven is that no, we have not found a mill and there is no need to eat at this In the countryside, everything elite related goes into that well which is really important, right? Because until now we have had circumstantial evidence that there has only been one site for a mill here because that is the best site there could be. now archeology is absolutely confirming it, it is certainly here, yes this was all leaked related to that mill, in fact the clue turns out to be the key to dating the oldest mill site.

By analyzing the various maps, we realize that the key map is that. of the parish this is the parish boundary on this side the parish boundary is the main one since the leak was man-made and does not follow any natural characteristics. This means that the elite must have been here when the parish boundary was drawn and that pushes it and the mill back to the 10th or 11th century before doomsday, on the main site, right next to where Phil is digging , we found a second millstone, but the quality of this stone is very poor, it is a rubbish stone that is not.

Well, it's when you think we're in a county with Dartmoor granite with ports where you can bring stone from the French Dean Basin forest not far away, what are they doing using rubbish like that? It is a new species of red sandstone conglomerate. write yes and it is very unusual, in fact it is the first one I have seen, but they would have had sand in their grain, wouldn't they use it as well?, but I suspect it was used at least laterally for grinding. animal feed, so it wouldn't have mattered as much or maybe some kind of coarse grinding, but I think the other thing is it tells us a little bit more of the story that this wasn't a particularly prosperous Natalie mill like they were.

Not buying good quality millstones, that contrasts greatly with the five shillings on doomsday, which was a lot of money, well, actually, isn't it? Yes, it shows how over a period of a thousand years the life of a mill can change. Yes, yes, Phil is trying to analyze what is happening to the layers that he is finding in his trench. He hasn't gotten there yet. He was starting to think that maybe we had sequences of gravel with pieces of wood stratified within them because this wood here is overlapping this gravel. Yeah, but this gravel here overlaps this big piece of wood there, yeah, and I started to wonder whether or not we could have some kind of sequence of layers and deposits with wood and then the wood rots and more gravel comes in and replace it and it all gradually builds up, yes, but I think all we can say at the moment is that certainly in this gravel there are archaeological deposits, at the moment it just looks like the only type of 18th and 19th century Victorian, but I think mainly over there.

It's the potential for earlier stuff further down the line, I think we need to give it a try and see where we can find something. Yes, I agree, we have the pit wheel, but we also have this other pit called the pit wheel that kept the gear to turn. the millstones we have a pretty deep hole where the pitch must be stoner crows if this is the pit wheel then it's going to be a deep groove almost as well it has to be almost as deep as the water wheel which is a hell of a hole down there hey and there's also a big lump of metal here do you want to see if we can get this out?

I think we should try it yeah well it looks like the pit wheel or part of the pit wheel what is this? A little bit, this is the edge of the gear right where the wooden teeth fitted. This would be the working face, have it upright, so vertical mounting, yes, vertical gear and these mortises are for the wooden teeth that were on the face. The gear meshes with the rest of the gears in the mill, so why are we using wooden gears? This was a fairly large diameter gear and in the early days they could not be cast to good tolerances and two cast iron gears working together would have been very noisy and stressed each other so the larger gears were often made with notches. cast to accommodate wooden teeth, all matched and prepared by hand, which made the gear much quieter and safer.

The center is the piece of gear that we now find that joins the waterwheel to the millstones. He was a key part of the mill

team

. We have now mapped out the internal walls of the building and have a good idea of ​​how the inside of the The last mill building on the site worked. It has a charming appearance. It's fantastic, isn't it? We have this wonderful outside waterwheel and all the energy that comes out there goes to this end of the mill. Well, we've got all the mill machinery up there on the first floor with the millstones grinding and then there at that end we've got the domestic building, take a look inside, why don't we move on to that big wall ? over there Tony, that's our gable wall that we have our water wheel behind and then halfway up you can see in front of it that's our pit wheel that's bringing all the power to this piece of machinery up here at the big turning wheel on the roof and above us we have the grinding stones, the milstein is working, that is the noise we can hear and then a small storage window below and a large window with many pains and the miller's desk below for keep all the records, you know, make sure everyone pays the right tithe at the right

time

of year and is actually sitting on a millstone on the ground oh, nice warm up here, yeah, it's much better, isn't it?

Is that so, Tony? That's because this is the heart of the house, so we have it on top. there we have the table under the table with the bench in front of it and we have the big dresser there with all the kinds of cups and bowls and bowls of pewter and earthenware and things like that, but the real thing The heart of the room and the house It's the stove over there, yes, yes, a big copper kettle with water boiling all the time and then on top of it we have pots and pans and all kinds of things, and this is the heart of the house, it's really cozy, isn't it? ?

The last building on this site appears to have been built in the 18th century. Our previous walls and the middle stones date from the end of the 17th century, but the details take us back to the beginning of the 17th century. It's got old bricks and even old stone at the base and just at the end of the day, three Phils come with the goods once again, this piece of wood starting there, yeah, well I managed to track it down and in fact I still have it in March. In other words, it goes under the wall, so that piece of wood has to predate that wall or at least have the same date as the foundation wood, exactly yes, the wood in this trench suggests a much older phase. earlier for the wheel pit than we thought, it all says 17th century, but I also think we probably have things earlier because the bottom of what leaked is incredibly worn out, it's incredibly full of gravel and right down there, I mean, we have we.

I have wood that goes under the floor. I think we're looking at some questionable medieval material. I think you see that the topographical situation of the place suggests that it predates even the structural things because this mill that passes along the road is the boundary of the parish that was probably fixed at the points of the 10th or 11th century is on this side, there is a very limited area, maybe about 50 meters on the side, a mill could be placed, we have tried it with three or four trenches, this is the most likely place for that, so you know, it's not just that it has 400 years, 500 years, it's probably been here for a thousand whenThis building was demolished in the 1960s, it was not just the end of a building that was a couple. of a hundred years, it was the end of almost a thousand years of grinding in this very place to make sure you get the latest updates, subscribe to this channel, follow us on social media, subscribe to our newsletter and join us on patreon.