21 July 2026

Every stream of significant size once had a series of watermills along its length to provide power for grinding corn.  On one of the many fine evenings in July, a dozen of our members paid a visit to a rare surviving example at Shepshed and we heard from Neil McHugh how he and his family have restored it to working order.

The mill is located on the Black Brook, close to its junction with Grace Dieu Brook, and there has been a mill on the site since the time of the Domesday Book.  The present building may date from the late 18^th century.  It formed part of the Garendon Estate and probably last ground corn in 1911 but the wheel continued to be used to drive farm machinery until 1936.  Neil’s father-in-law bought the property in 1996, intending to convert it into two houses, but finding how much intact mill equipment remained inside one of them and being an engineer, he took on the project of restoring it.

The wheel was probably made in Loughborough.  It is a “breast-shot” type, in which the incoming water fills buckets high on the near side and the wheel turns “backwards”.  This means that at the bottom of the wheel, it moves in the same direction as the outgoing water and is more efficient.  At some time, the wheel has been lowered to gain more power, which involved digging a new culvert 250 feet long.

The mill machinery is of an unusual design, with the main drive gear being mounted vertically on the same shaft as the wheel, instead of the more usual arrangement with the gear overhead and horizontal.  There are four pairs of millstones: the upper stone rotates just above the fixed lower stone and the spacing between them can be finely adjusted with a lever to change the grade of flour produced.  Two of the upper stones are of Derbyshire millstone grit and are each made as a single piece, but the other two are of French burrstone.  That is more resistant to wear but is quarried in smaller pieces so the stones are made up of separate segments and the design includes pockets for lead weights to ensure they are correctly balanced.  The mill wheel also drives a hoist, which lifts sacks of grain to the hoppers on the top floor; a “damsel”, which jiggles the chute to keep the grain flowing freely; and a machine that brushes the flour through a series of rotating mesh cylinders to sieve it.  The speed is controlled simply by allowing more or less water to flow to the wheel: there is no brake!

It has clearly been a labour of love for Neil and Haidee to bring the mill back to working order and it won them an award from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.  Sadly, their flour does not meet modern standards for commercial sale so they currently run the mill only for occasional demonstrations but they hope to return to holding public open days in future.