Witherslack Mill

The mill was mentioned in the Manorial Court records of 1652 and used by the customary tenants of the Manor of Withers1ack, held by the Earl of Derby. By an Indenture of the 26th August 1713 some 40 tenants, the sum total of householders in the village, conveyed all their interests at a £ 1.00 per head to Robert Powe Milner of Witherslack for the term of one thousand years paying one peppercorn on the 25th December every year, if it was demanded. Fines were still held on the death of the Earls of Derby. (1)

It was said to have been a Bobbin Mill from 1814-1837(2) but several Indentures continued the line until it went to Thomas Dickenson in 1804, when it passed to James Dickenson, and by Will to his grandson William Dickenson. In 1892 in a conveyance by William Dickenson of the Mill in Witherslack, Milner, to William Farrer Ecroyde, Gentleman, of Whitbarrow Lodge, all the leaseholds customary freehold premises mentioned, endorsed, produced and allowed at the Court Baron held 21st June 1892 in Witherslack held at the Derby Arms Hotel.

Farrers continued to lease the mill for working until they sold it to W & J Pye in 1960, which was the last watermill they bought. (3)

In 1981 Pye's sold it to Keith Scott who converted the mill into luxury homes with which he won a Royal Institute of British Architects architecture award in the North West in 1988, but with the water wheel intact and included in one of the flats. (4)

The wheel was 22 foot in diameter with a phosphor bronze bearing overshot wheel with oakshaft and wooden buckets. The mill had 4 pairs of stones, an oats roller and a kiln for oatmeal. (5) There were two 4 foot diameter stones, both top runners, one French Bur, of vesicular flint from Epernon, in sections bounded by iron hoops, the other a one piece Derby Grit. (5) In 1951 a flood smashed the axle and it was unused unti11960, when it was sold and the wooden axle was replaced by a steel one.

1. The Witherslack Manor Court Rolls DDK Lancashire Record Office

2. Mills of South Cumbria by M. Shields

3. Pye John A. & Angela P. Bathgate 'From Century to Century' July 1997 Pye Farm Feeds Lancaster

4. Ibid

5. Ibid