The fountain mixer is a two-storey steel drum that stretched from the walkway at the top of the building and ends in a funnel shape on the first floor, having passed through the bins floor. It is a relatively modern agricultural machine that was typically used to add moisture to the corn prior to grinding it.
We've closed the mill gates to stop the flow of water over the waterwheel. Now that the wheel has dried out, we can remove the rusting buckets and start to renovate the wheel, ready for new buckets to be installed. Once the buckets have been removed, we'll be able to inspect the wall behind and remove whatever had stopped the wheel from turning. When the frame has been renovated, we'll install new buckets and then look at renovating the mill gates and mill tray.
The builders did a great job of making the door look in place and in character. In fact, this isn't the final door, it's a temporary and very sturdy one that will be there during the renovation.
Once the renovation is complete, it will be replaced with a door that is even more like the original front door to the mill.
Out of the four trial pits that were dug, one had to be abandoned because it filled up with water too quickly. The archaeologists found their lunch in another pit - in the form of a live crayfish.
On the south side of the mill, they found remains of the riverbed. This implies that the river previously ran through what is now the mill and possibly alongside a previous, smaller mill.
It took a while to get going because they had to drill the mortar out from between the bricks. Great care was taken to preserve as many whole bricks as possible so that they can be re-used to replace damaged bricks elsewhere in the mill. Broken bricks were ground up and used to make sure that the mortar matched the rest of the mortar in that wall.
When we bought the mill, there was a serious leak in the west wall that had been there for a number of years. When the water levels were high in the lake at the back of Flitwick Mill House, a rod of water poured through into the mill. The floorboards of the ground floor had been rotting away in the humid environment for many years.
