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- This traditional water mill can grind
over 550 pounds of flour in a single day.
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This is the Lurgashall Watermill
of Weald and Downland Museum in Singleton, West Sussex.
- The way we make the flour is exactly the same way
as it's been made for generations.
The wheat goes in at the top,
the flour comes out of the bottom.
We don't add anything in at all.
We don't take anything out.
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- [Narrator] The Lurgashall Mill dates the 17th century,
but despite being over 400 years old,
it hasn't always been in the same location.
Its original site was the Lurgashall village
in West Sussex, which it is named after.
The original mill had two water wheels in tandem,
each wheel driving its own independent set of machinery.
With time, only the tail water wheel remained in use
and the cast-iron wheel replaced the wooden one.
The Lurgashall Mill was incorporated
into the museum in 1973.
The museum carried out restoration works
of the machinery and the interior,
but it was still lacking something essential.
- The problem was that on this site we don't have a river.
So, we had to engineer a whole water system,
dig out a big pond, and line it
because underneath is chalk, which absorbs water.
And then, below the wheel we need another pond
to collect the water.
That had to be dug out and lined.
And because there's no river, we have to pump
that water back up and reuse it.
- [Narrator] Nowadays, the mill is used
for grinding corn, flour, and animal feed.
It supplies to small bakers and farm shops
around the Singleton village.
We followed a journey of a bag of wheat
as it is milled into flour.
The mill is structured over three floors.
The top floor, where grain is fed from,
the first floor, or stone floor,
where the grinding takes place, and the ground floor,
or spout floor, where a horizontal shaft
connects the water wheel to the machinery.
- The mill's driven by water and so,
we need to have water flowing over the waterwheel.
We start the mill
by taking a very large spanner up to the sluice gates,
which control where the water comes out
of the big mill pond. We open the sluice gate,
water then flows along a channel,
at the back of the mill, until it reaches the water wheel;
and it starts to fill up what we call buckets.
They don't look like the bucket,
that you would use for cleaning your floors,
something like that; but, each slot contains water,
and we need to fill about four of those,
before the weight of the water makes the wheel turn,
and then the water tops up the next one,
and the next one so it keeps turning continuously.
- The mill is 12 feet in diameter, when grinding,
it turns at about six revolutions per minute;
each complete turn is powered by 200 gallons of water.
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- When we need to mill, we take a bag into the mill,
and we use a chain hoist,
to lift it up to the top floor of the mill;
we then open the bag,
sometimes the string will pull,
sometimes we have to use scissors,
and we then poor it down the chute,
into a hopper above the machinery.
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- In this big barrel, there are two stones,
just like these miniature ones,
the bottom one called the bedstone that doesn't move,
the top one called the runnerstone,
is turned by the machinery
and is the one that is actually doing the grinding.
- We can control the grade of the flour
by the amount of grain that we put in,
and the distance apart of the stones,
and everything is checked,
by what is known as the rule of thumb.
With no gauges, no machinery,
we just use our thumb and our forefinger,
and if it feels right, it is right.
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- Overall the stones rotate 13 and a half times,
each rotation of the water wheel,
at an average speed of 80 revolutions per minute.
- I enjoy the fact that when I come to the Museum,
at the end of the day, I can look at a pile of flour
and say: "I helped to make that"
and because we're also a museum, and we have visitors,
its fascinating to talk to the visitors,
and some of them tell me stories,
about how they have seen a mill being used,
when they were children.
You get people who come from various parts of the world,
telling us how it was used,
one lady from Cambodia,
told me how to make rice noodles using one.
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