Huxter, Norse Mill
Horizontal Mill (Post Medieval)
Site Name Huxter, Norse Mill
Classification Horizontal Mill (Post Medieval)
Alternative Name(s) Huxter 1
Canmore ID 216
Site Number HU15NE 19
NGR HU 1728 5704
Datum OSGB36 - NGR
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/site/216
- Council Shetland Islands
- Parish Walls And Sandness
- Former Region Shetland Islands Area
- Former District Shetland
- Former County Shetland
HU15NE 19 1727 5704
Mill (NAT)
OS 6" map, Shetland, 1st ed. (1882), sheet xli.
See also:
HU15NE 68 HU 17253 56965 Loch Huxter, Dam.
See also HU25NE 25, HU25NE 26 and HU25NE 27.
[Listed as group of mills with HU15NE 25-7]. (Location cited as HU 173 572). Norse Mills, Huxter, 19th century or earlier. A very fine group of three mills, all with 9-paddle tirls about 3ft (1m) in diameter. The tirls in the top and bottom mills have concrete centres. The bottom mill is intact with a pair of 28in (0.71m)-diameter stones. Unusually there is a small window above the door.
J R Hume 1977.
Demolished.
Visited by G Douglas (SIAS), October 1984.
Publication Account (1986)
These buildings form a chain of three mills on the burn that empties from the Loch of Huxter into the Sound of Papa. The mills are grouped within a short distance of about 75m, with the site of a fourth mill, now demolished, a similar distance upstream [HU15NE 19]. They are served by short stone-lined lades, cutting off meanders in the burn, and there is a fall of some 8.2m between the floor levels of the top and bottom mill. All the buildings are aligned across the lade with the water-courses running transversely beneath the side-walls.
The two upper structures survive as masonry shells, but the lowest building retains its heather-and straw-thatched gabled roof. It is oblong on plan, averaging 18 ft (5.49m) in length by 9 ft 6 in (2.90m) transversely over walls 2 ft (0.61m) thick; the entrance is in the E gable-wall. It still has the wooden chute, or pentrough, for directing the water onto the tirl in a clockwise direction. The tirl is of concrete, but an original specimen survives in one of the other mills. This consists of a wooden, elongated barrel-shaped hub (nave) with nine flat paddles. The lower mill also retains a pair of millstones, the bedstone (understone) being 2 ft 9 1/2 in (0.85m) in diameter and 5 1/8 in (130mm) thick, the runner stone (upperstone) slightly less in each dimension. Until a few years ago it was complete with a square wooden hopper. The drawing is intended to be a general representation of a horizontal mill, based on the Huxter examples and documentary sources.
Information from RCAHMS ‘Monuments of Industry: An Illustrated Historical Record’, (1986). Visited 1980.
