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Hardback book 23 x 29 cm 120pp Fully illustrated with many line drawings and colour and b/w photos, maps etc. A fascinatiing and unusual book. An ideal present!
Author's introduction:
Small thatched corn-mill buildings were a common sight on streams in the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides for many years and up until the 1930s. These ingenious structures were used by the crofters to provide them with an essential produce – oat and barley meal. Crofting life was small-scale agriculture and the local horizontal mills were an integral part of this. Milling was marked within the yearly cycle which included the cultivation of small portions of land, called crofts, alongside the tending of a small number of sheep and cattle, as well as securing fuel from the peat of the moorlands and a ready supply of fish by off-shore fishing. These were traditional, long-standing Gaelic-speaking communities with a strong presence of oral tales, music and work-songs.
This new book sets its small horizontal island mills within the social and historical life of the island. It seeks to answer where these mills may have come from, given that their every part is to be found in horizontal mills in many countries in Europe and beyond. Were they, for example, introduced by Viking settlers – hence their being named Norse Mills – or were they brought at an earlier period by Celts from Ireland where there is concrete evidence of their early use? The book contains a detailed gazetteer of over 250 sites where mills were once worked throughout the island, along with a map reference for each and a simple grading of the condition of the sites. Almost all these sites are ruins of the former mill building and lade. The book is extensively illustrated with pen and ink drawings and a range of photographs and other images. |
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| Author |
Finlay MacLeod |
| ISBN |
978 086152 3627 |
| Price: |
£15.00 (€ 16.59)
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Norse Mills of Lewis
