At eighty pence and eighty pages, this is among the lightest book purchases I have made in the past few years. I picked it up from the Dovehouse Hospice shop in Hedon two weeks ago. An inscription on the title page indicates it was previously owned by a J. Richardson. Little explanation is required for the topic of the book. Vince recounts, in a very compact format, the emergence of the practice of grinding grains for food, from the prehistoric world to the ancient, then medieval, then modern, from hand tools to human-powered wheels to the titular watermills and the various substances — including copper, paper, snuff and lead, which were extracted or refined with their aid. There follows a similarly-compressed explanation of the materials and construction techniques — the different ways in which the pins, braces and clasps can be arranged, as well as the financial considerations involved in switching from wood to cast iron (or some hybrid arrangement) in the eighteenth century. After that came an explanation of how the mill apparatus actually works; not just the internal interaction of all the cogs and pulleys, but also the way the external landscape has to be manipulated to direct the water to the mill. The main piece of information that I picked up from here is the distinction between an undershot wheel where the water pushes along the bottom and an overshot wheel where it pushes along the top. There were also two warnings, perhaps slightly contradictory, about mills left unattended: A waterwheel left locked into a stationary state can suffer rotting in its lower half which results in the whole construction disintegrating over time, yet a wheel left unlocked is liable to spin too quickly under heavy wind or rain so that the dry components inside fly apart or even catch fire. This part of the book was accompanied by mechanical diagrams as well as a brief table of statistics about the machines’ power, speed and output.

All that I have just described was concluded on page 20. The rest of the book, apart from the index and a few pages of photographs (on glossier paper but still monochrome), was a list of “some notable watermills” (with “some” here meaning many dozens) in the United Kingdom. Each had a short paragraph about its history, construction, operation, current ownership and opening times. Since this edition was published in 1987 I don’t imagine much of what was written in that chapter is still true. I would be minded nowadays to look these places up on the internet before dialling any of the telephone numbers Vince has given. What struck me most about this section is that, among all the counties of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (and even the Isle of Man) that were documented there was no mention of East Yorkshire, whether under that name or as “Humberside”. If there aren’t any, surely that itself is worthy of mention? I can only infer that none of our mills met Vince’s standard of notability!