General view

Description General view

Date 1900

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number SC 695945

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of RC 549

Scope and Content Arnol Mill, Barvas, Lewis, Western Isles Arnol, a crofting community of traditional island blackhouses, lies in the parish of Barvas on the north-west Atlantic coastline of Lewis. This photograph of Arnol Mill, taken in 1900 by Erskine Beveridge, is a unique photographic record of the last horizontal mill used by the Arnol crofters. This conical-shaped building consists of a lower chamber, built of boulders held together without mortar, and an upper chamber constructed from peat turfs, lined internally with stones. The roof is thatched, with the thatch firmly secured by ropes tied down and anchored by large stones around the wall-head. The outer part of the wall-head forms a broad ledge which runs round the building and provides a platform from which the thatch can be repaired or replaced. The mill lade can be seen in the foreground. Water from the lade was concentrated by means of a narrow chute on the blades of a horizontal waterwheel which turned below the floor of the mill in the lower chamber. The wheel was directly linked, without gearing, to the upper of two millstones. A wooden hopper was suspended above the millstones, and filled with grain which trickled out of it into a wooden shoe which directed it into the eye of the upper millstone to be ground into meal. Originally most of the grain ground was bere, an old variety of barley which gave a higher yield of meal that oats. Bere straw was used for thatching, and when the thatch was replaced, the old straw provided manure for the fields. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap