The Miller's Daughter's tour

Wales: We booked a tour of Y Felin, The Mill, in St. Dogmael's and we were really glad we had. We were the only three in the group so it was, in effect, a private tour and extremely interesting. Our guide was Emma, the miller's daughter. She first showed us how the waterwheel kicks in when the sluice gate is opened. The initial gush of water is quite spectacular and then the wheel gradually assumes its steady. smooth turning.

Inside the mill, in the basement, the water wheel's shaft drives a series of cog wheels with wooden teeth, which operate all the machinery.

On the top floor, a rope and pulley system, driven by the water wheel's power, is simply operated - by sitting on the lever!

Sacks of grain can thus be winched up through a hatch in the floorboards.

The grain is then poured through a fabric chute into a hopper below.

The hopper steadily feeds it into the machinery, where the huge grinding stones get to work. The water-driven power makes the top stone rotate and the grain is fed along channels and is crushed.

Depending on what is being made, the flour pours down through chutes to the ground floor

or can be diverted into a flour grading machine with a series of different gauge meshes, that rotates and sifts the flour,

eventually delivering it through tubes into bags on the floor below.

The finished produce: wholemeal flour, spelt flour, unbleached white flour, rolled oats and a number of other products, can be purchased directly from the mill and from farmers' markets and local outlets. Emma explained that the benefits of the traditional method mean that all the nutrients are retained, whereas with mass produced flour, the wheatgerm and bran are removed and then added back later, and flours from different sources are often blended. (See HERE if you're interested.) 

I bought some rolled oats, which I've yet to try. Sadly, I can't eat wheat flour but my friends bought some bread for their sandwiches. It was rich and crumbly, a bit tricky to cut evenly with the blunt bread knife in our holiday flat (!) but delicious nonetheless. We really enjoyed the tour. Another thing that I'd highly recommend if you're ever in mid Wales.