Welsh Journals

Watermtll: Life STORY OF A WELSH Cornmtll. By David Llewelyn Davies. Ceiriog Press, 8 Vicarage Road, Uangollen, LL20 8HF, 1997. Pp. 192. £ 14.00. Felin Lyn, the subject of this work, is now no more. The water-driven flour mill, located in the delectable valley of the Ceiriog some four miles to the west of Chirk, has, like myriad other vernacular structures in the past decades, moved inexorably from dereliction to destruction. Yet, if all physical evidence of the former mill and its ancillary structures has been obliterated, its profound importance in the local economy from medieval times into the earlier years of the present century is here recalled by David Llewelyn Davies in this splendidly produced book which has been some twenty years in gestation. Mr Davies's volume carries about it all the hallmarks of a labour of love, and any literary deficiencies and technical errors are amply com- pensated by his infectious enthusiasm and eye for detail. Writing good local history is never easy, and the problems are severely compounded if, like Mr Davies, one lives in Western Canada and attempts to write on a somewhat obscure area of north-east Wales. Nevertheless, this book demonstrates just how much can be done from afar by an intelligent approach to printed and manuscript sources, the preparedness to establish contact with historians living locally, and the willingness to undertake the voluminous correspond- ence inevitably associated with a project of this sort. Grains of one description or another have always formed a vital component of the human diet and a means of processing them, from prehistoric parching and quemstone grinding through to the modem electrically-driven roller mill, have been absolutely essential to human society. Like other mills, Felin Lyn (in the final stage of the centuries-old development of the corn-grinding watermill) was a vital link in the human food chain before its importance waned in the early years of the twentieth century as local people began to purchase cheap imported flour for home bread-making. Decades earlier it was processing some four-fifths of the cereal grains from a seven-square-mile 'catchment area' serving upwards of 500 people. Mr Davies provides a mass of technical detail on the structure and operation of the mill and its internal layout and water supply, in addition to offering biographical sketches of owners, tenants and other personalia. This will be of great interest to molinologists while historians will be impressed by the extent to which the mill was a consumer as well as a producer within the local and wider economy. Sacks, iron, timber, sharpening stones and, of course, millstones (transported some 130 miles from the millstone grit of Anglesey) regularly found their way to Felin Lyn, while the ancillary water- driven sawmill offered a variety of services to the locality. But the mill was