(Grade II listed in 1956)
(Grade II listed in 1956)
The Mill probably dates from the 1600s. In 1663, the miller Thomas Ham died, leaving £150 to his under-age son Thomas and enough money to provide for his son-in-law and other relations, as well as the parich church and the poor of the village.
In 1690, the Portesham miller Richard Thrasher less generously left his son, who was working at the Abbotsbury mill, one shilling, a Bible and a brass pot. At this time the mill passed to Thomas Cole, who was equally careful with his money, leaving to one Richard Legg "Fourteen pounds which I lent to him and yet remaines in his hands".
Fifty years on, in 1749, the mill was in trouble ~ the millers William Ford and Richard Westlake were given notice that their household goods had been impounded to settle arrears of rent ~ significant arrears, for the annual rent was £56 and the pair owed £140. Everything went ~ 3 horses, 2 pigs, a cock and 3 hens, a hayrick, a stock of furze faggots and a wheelbarrow, and that was only the farm goods. The house was cleared of several barrels and bottles, weights and stones, a cupboard, 2 tables and 3 chairs, 1 feather and 3 dust beds, a lantern, a basket, a mattock, firetongs, a skimming ladle and a pair of boots.
Not that it solved anything ~ only 10 years later, the Estate bailiff had to compile a list of "those names who will not grind at our Lord's Mill": a dozen of them, including two innkeepers, a farmer, two farm labourers, and a captain. The list shows that the Estate was still enforcing the ancient manorial right which compelled their tenants to bring their corn to the manor's mill for grinding. It wasn't as simple as taking the corn elsewhere.
Successive millers in the 19th century left to run farms. Jonathan Adams became miller in 1875, taking over from the Wallbridge family who had come here in 1848, but he too turned to farming in 1880. Three more millers ~ John Baillet Rendall, Andrew Adams Strode, and Edgar Strode who appears in the directories as a miller in 1923 and 1927, and as a farmer in 1931 and 1939 ~ later became farmers.
The traditional date for the closing of the mill is 1921. When Edgar Strode died, his farm was incorporated with that of William ("Bossy") Durden next door, who used the mill as an outhouse: his farm wagon, marked "Abbotsbury Mill Farm", is in Sidmouth, and some of his harness is kept in Dorchester. The old people can remember the mill when it was in used after the First World War: at harvest time, the children used to be taken along in wagons to farms six or seven miles east or west of the village and go leaving in the fields; then they would take the corn down to the mill to be threshec, and feed it to the fowls at home. They remember the noise, the thumpety-thump of the mill machinery and the clackety-clack of the wheel. Strode's business declined after he lost a relative in the Great War.
In 1939 the wheel was dismantled for the war effort: someone used an oxy-acetylene torch and nearly set the building on fire. It then stood unused until 1968.
The mill was restored in 1971 by Margaret Berry, who also restored the Dairy House in Church Street. The mill wheels dominate two floors of the conversion, described in detail in the Dorset Echo at the time. By 1984, it was taken over by Winifred Giles, and then passed to Guy East, a film producer whose credits in Driving Miss Daisy and Sliding Doors, and changed hands once more in 1997.
Jeremy Harte's notes end with the tantalising words "The millstream is remarkable for running uphill."