General View from NW of Horizontal Mill. Copy of 35 mm colour transparency.

Description General View from NW of Horizontal Mill. Copy of 35 mm colour transparency.

Date 9/7/1984

Collection Papers of Professor John R Hume, economic and industrial historian, Glasgow, Scotland

Catalogue Number SC 866882

Category On-line Digital Images

Scope and Content Horizontal mill, Bragar, Lewis Horizontal mills work in a similar way to a rotary hand quern. A top stone with a central hole revolves on top of a fixed bottom stone, driven directly by a horizontal waterwheel. They are sometimes called Norse or click mills (the latter name referring to the noise the mill made whilst in use). This view shows a horizontal mill at Bragar, Lewis, the only complete mill, in original condition, surviving in the 'Long Island'. It is built like the local 'black houses', oval in plan, of drystone construction, and with the trusses of the thatched roof set on the inside of the wallheads. Mills like this were cheap to build, and used very little timber and iron in their construction. This one was still virtually complete when photographed in 1984. Such mills were common in Shetland and Lewis, where streams to drive vertical mills were rare, and capital to build them scarce. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap