As many of you will have heard, and will see from the pictures here, Wherwell Mill suffered a catastrophic fire on 12 April 2025.  Over 50 fire fighters attended.

The road past the mill was still closed over a week later, but the remains can be viewed across the fields from near the churchyard.  It is clear that both the mill house and the mill are completely burnt out.  Contrast these pictures with the one bottom right, which shows the mill in 2006 when HMG spent several weeks cleaning and recording.

The mill had the remains of a waterwheel, and a complete Armfield River Patent turbine which powered a generator manufactured by Drake and Gorman Ltd.  The generator room still had a full set of glass cases and electrodes for the batteries.  The turbine was also linked by a layshaft to a sawbench in the weather-boarded shed.  In the mill there were the remains of milling machinery and equipment, such as two pairs of stones with wooden hurst frames and metal stone nuts, a wooden wallower (with a metal wallower added), great spur wheel, and crown wheel, as well as a drive shaft with several wooden pulleys;  the bin floor was almost complete, with a drive shaft running its full length, a sack hoist (with an interesting complex mechanism), and bins, chutes, elevators (still with buckets in place), and flour dressers.  There are additional details in The Mills and Millers of Hampshire vol 2.

Here are some pictures taken during the recording in 2006:

A wooden wallower with a metal wallower added

The bin floor with hopper in an older flat-bottomed grain bin

John Silman cleaning the generator;  note the turbine control left and the switchgear on the right

I suspect that this scrappy drawing that I did in 2006, and the various notes and photos that we all took,
are now all that remains of this interesting building.