Wiltshire Buildings Record is lucky enough to see all sorts of interesting buildings, not just houses but industrial buildings, chapels, and farm buildings to name a selection. We have also seen a few mills. The following snippets of history were part of the research for Great Cheverell Mill. This is a former water mill dating from the late 18th and early 19th century found in a very rural setting along Cheverell Green Road, north of the village of Great Cheverell. It is a grade II listed building and said to date from the later 18th or earlier 19th century. However, there has been a mill on the site since at least the 15th century. Mill buildings in this location have served a number of purposes over the centuries including the milling of flour, fulling and supporting an edge toolmaking business. The millers were often farmers as well and the mill buildings along with an adjacent farmhouse were part of the Cheverell Mill Farm estate in the 19th century.
This one has had a rather interesting and at times, colourful history. Sometime between 1699 and 1784, part of the mill site became associated with Isaac Axford, a bankrupt. An Isaac Axford, a grocer and a Baptist originally from Erlestoke (1731-1816) married Hannah Lightfoot, a Quaker, in 1753, when an apprentice in Ludgate, London. They were together for a short while before she absconded after their marriage was challenged. More significantly it has been rumoured she had an affair with George III when Prince of Wales. The rumours go as far as suggesting that she even became his wife and had a child. How much of this is true is unknown. It is a possibility that this was the same Isaac Axford who owned a part of Winsmore Mill in Great Cheverell up to the 1780s. Land tax records for the parish of Great Cheverell suggest that Winsmore Mill, as it was known then, was purchased by James Potter in 1789. He reconstructed it in brick in two phases, probably the first phase occurring once the Potter brothers began leasing the mill in 1785 or on purchase. Kenneth Rogers (1976) in his book, Wiltshire and Somerset Woollen Mills states:
“It was then let to Henry and James Potter, who began a well-known edge-tool business and no doubt converted the mill for that trade.”
By 1802, a second larger mill building on the James Potter Mill Estate was constructed to the south-east of the original mill also for edge tool making. Thereafter, they were probably known together as Potters Mill but sometimes referred to separately as Winsmore (or Winsborough) Mill and the Edge Tool (or Iron) Mill. George Potter, James’s son and also an edge toolmaker of Great Cheverell died in 1815 and his will dated the same year indicates that his brother James then inherited the family business. During James Potter’s tenure and later after the estate’s purchase by local landowner, George Watson Taylor, some or all of the tenants sub-let part of the site, the edge tool mill, to H.P. Burt and others. Evidence of this is found in newspapers, poor rate records and rental accounts of the George Watson Taylor estate. Starting with the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette on Thursday 15 March 1827 it was reported:
“Chas. Adcock for stealing some implements from the tool manufactory of Messrs. Burt, of Great Cheverell, was sentenced to 12 cal. Months hard labour.”
A trade card has been found which indicates the nature of the business run by Burt & Son:
George Watson Taylor was a man who inherited great wealth after his marriage to an heiress, Anna Susannah Taylor who succeeded her brother, Sir Simon Taylor in 1815 to a great fortune. Her family were plantation owners in Jamaica. George Watson Taylor and his wife were quickly elevated in society but due to the squandering of the inheritance, the discovery of alternative sources of sugar affecting the plantation trade and the movement for the abolition of slavery, he eventually fell from grace with huge debts, before his death in Edinburgh in 1841.
The edge-tool mill at Great Cheverell was advertised for sale in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal on Monday 16th June 1834.
“The Edge-tool Mill at Cheverell has 12-horse water-power, and all requisite Machinery for forging, turning, grinding, boring, &c., and it may safely be said few such opportunities have been, or can be found for the profitable investment of capital as that now offered. – Further particulars may be known on application (if by letter, to be paid), to Mr. Burt, or Mr. Robertson, iron-merchant, Bristol.”
By 1848 the edge tool business had gone and, James and John Webb were describe as millers in the parish of Great Cheverell. The 1851 Census records James Webb, aged 29, the miller at the ‘Mill’ and John Webb aged 31 farmer of ‘Mill farm’ consisting of 56 acres.
It is unclear if the mill was in use between 1891 and 1901 as the Bristow family, who were tenants there at that time, appeared to be focussed on farming. In 1910 Great Cheverell Mill Farm was advertised for sale along with other parts of the Erlestoke estate of George Watson Taylor. By the time of the 1911 Census, William Bristow aged 50 was still the farmer of Great Cheverell Mill Farm, now described as a dairy farm. However, the water mill was marked as disused on the 25 inch OS map of 1924. It took some time, but soon after 1976 the mill was first converted to a dwelling, and is now a comfortable family home.
Louise Purdy & Dorothy Treasure, Wiltshire Buildings Record