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Archaeology Notes
Event ID 799809
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Archaeology Notes
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/799809
HY50SW 23 51554 04672
(Location cited as HY 516 047). Sebay Mill, rebuilt 1854. A massive three-storey rubble building on an L plan. The main range is four bays long. There were two pairs of stones driven by an overshot wheel. The wheel and machinery have been removed.
J R Hume 1977.
This mainly 19th-century rubble-built mill was driven by the water taken from the Burn of Langskaill. The mill complex consisted of a slate roofed main building and kiln, and a 2-storey flat-roof engine house. The engine house, which does not appear on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map of 1902 (Orkney, sheet CXV.2), contained an internal combustion engine which assisted the water wheel when the water level was low. The kiln and engine house areas were butt jointed to the main building suggesting that the kiln area was not integral to the original mill layout. The main mill building housed 2 sets of millstones 1.40m in diameter which had been removed. There was no trace of machinery within any of the buildings. The mill was no longer in use as a mill by 1946 (the last miller was Graham Bewes). The buildings were in use as a motor car repair works on the date of survey.
The waterwheel, which had been removed, was of the overshot type measuring 4.0m in maximum diameter with a maximum width of 1.4m. The partially surviving concrete lade measured 1.0m in width and 0.30m in depth and the 'on/off door' controlling water feed to the wheel was in situ on the date of survey.
Information from Scottish Industrial Archaeology Survey (GJD) 25 October 1981.
NMRS MS/500/35/32.
