Water Mill

A Mill on the Beane: History & Floods
James Currie, 21 February 2010
[From the March 2010 WJ]

Walkern Flour Mills stand guard at the southern entrance to the village as the road crosses the River Beane. A small river but the water has repeatedly been turned to valuable use. The watermark in the paper from which Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was printed by Caxton shows that it came from a mill where the River Beane joins the River Lea at Hertford. The Priors at Clay Hall [now Walkern Hall], as told in The Chronicle of Small Beer, fished for trout there, and in 1884 one trout weighed in at 1lb and 12 ounces. There is rather less of the Beane these days. So much water was being extracted by the Three Valleys Water Company that in the late nineties after several dry summers we called it ‘The River Has-Beane’.

In the Domesday Book a fulling mill is listed at Walkern. This would have been at the ford across the Beane near St Mary’s, where house platforms show that the village originally clustered round the church. In an aisle a former Norman governor of Colchester Castle lies with stone hands praying, his body brought down Dirty Lane from the motte and bailey castle at Walkern Bury.

The name Walkern itself is derived from a word for fulling, which is to cleanse and thicken a cloth with fuller’s earth. This silicate of alumina was so valuable in medieval times that it was not allowed to be exported from England to rivals in the low countries; in Elizabethan times the States General of the Netherlands bought the papal monopoly in alum which was used in dying. In an Act of Henry VIII dated 1511 it says ‘The Walker and the Fuller shall truly walke full thick and worke every web of woollen yarne.’ (OED). The earth was walked into the cloth in troughs and then rinsed out in the River Beane; the reference to ‘the six brown walkers’ in the round song ‘Green Grow the Rushes O!’ reflects how millers became mired in clay. A strip of yellow clay runs across the village but that this is not the proper fuller’s earth.

Lionel M. Munby in The Hertfordshire Landscape takes a particular delight in the Beane; its valley runs, from the Thames/Ouse watershed some four miles north of Walkern and down the centre of northern Hertfordshire to the county town. He says that these fine veined rivers of north Hertfordshire, such at the Beane, the Rib and the delightfully named Mimram, had numerous mills of all sorts to serve London’s needs: fulling cloth, grinding flour and making paper. And London served the needs of the millers; at Walkern Mill we have the cast iron manufacturers’ balancing weight which had been used to trim a millstone:
WM GARNER AND SONS
MILLSTONE MAKERS
MILLWRIGHTS
57 MARK LANE E C
LONDON

It is argued that the industrial revolution could not happened without the mechanical skills and crafts developed in the water and wind milling industry. The Cromer postmill, driven by wind on the ridge above the Beane valley, possibly came to be replaced or at least rivalled by the water mill in the valley.

Walkern’s water-powered Flour Mill was built a mile downstream from the church because there is a sharper fall in the River Beane at that point. A seismic geological survey in about 2000 identified a deep fault of some 50 metres in the rock under the river at this point and the land drop reflects this. A millpond grew north of the mill. Behind the dykes and sluices a substantial enough store of water could be built up to power the original wooden waterwheels. The earlier mill would probably have been only two stories but, at various points in the nineteenth century, was enlarged to the four storey building that we see today with its typical mansard roof. According to John Vines (Discovering Watermills Aylesbury Shire 1980 p.22) it is only the position of the waterwheel which is likely to be constant as a mill changes and grows.

In 1831 George David Pearman, who was a substantial local farmer, bought the mill site from the Garratts, and during the nineteenth century there were two or three enlargements. We found in the river a piece of marble cut to the size of a brick which has been roughly incised ‘GDP 1865’. At one time during the mid nineteenth century there was enough demand for the miller to build a second mill race and to run two large cast-iron wheels (the two bricked up arches can be easily seen on the north wall of the mill and one of the mill races has been turned into a cellar under the mill).

At Walkern water power had given way in part to steam by 1861. On the front of the Walkern water mill under the gables of the mansard roof overlooking the bridge a proud announcement was cut into the into a white panel in the glowing red brick:
G.D. Pearman
Walkern
Flour Mills
1881
Somebody has scratched the dates 1828, 1836 and 1856 in the spaces between the large 1881 figures, which were probably the dates when enlargements made.

Following bad harvests in the 1870s prairie hard wheat was imported into Britain for the first time and with it came the industrialised processes of steam baking. The soft white flour, used by the French to this day for their bread, went out of fashion. The degradation of British bread was on its way. Water power was no longer powerful enough to grind the new hard wheat. The Garratts and then the Pearmans boldly invested in the new technology, and by the bridge rose the brave new mill and from the southern corner emerged a dark satanic chimney almost twice as high as the substantial new mill building. A steam engine’s coal smoke spread up the village by the prevailing south-westerly wind. At some time, probably in the early twentieth century, a grain silo was built into the corner of the mill which was rather higher than the mill itself. The mill stopped work before 1939. In 1940, under the threat of German invasion, the Home Guard scratched out the name ‘WALKERN’ to confuse any Panzer division which advanced up the Beane valley. The Home Guard used sandbags to build a sniper’s nest in the mill. Local people saw the working mill, and I would love to collect their memories. Please contact me through the editor…