Mills of Britain

Mills of Britain

This dataset was created by project members of the ‘Away from the Water’: The First Energy Transition, British Textiles 1770-1890 project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. This project revisits the history and underexplored role of waterpower during the British Industrial Revolution to better understand the dynamic forces driving the shift away from the water to coal-fuelled steam power in early factories. Included in this work has been the development of a catalogue of mills from 18-19th-century maps to show where mills were distributed and how many watermills and windmills existed at the time.

This dataset was derived using map scans provided by the National Library of Scotland, including the Roy Military Survey of Scotland and early county maps, as well as map sheets held externally by the British Library, the National Library of Wales the Wiley Digital Archive for the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), the National Library of France, the Digital Archive at McMaster University Library, Yale University Library, and the David Rumsey Map Collection at Stanford University Library.

The data shared here are part of a larger historic dataset in the article, ‘Limited waterpower contributed to rise of steam power in British “Cottonopolis”’, published by the ‘Away from the Water’ team. The Mills of Britain dataset contains the 1729-1836 records and metadata associated with mills. To explore the entire open-access dataset, please visit the ‘Historic Waterpower Britain’ FigShare repository.

Some potential areas for future exploration of these data include:

• Heritage: Complementary documentation for locations and number of historic buildings and/or machines.

• Environmental: Suggestive evidence for locations featuring historic waterway barriers (i.e., weirs, dams).

• Socio-Economic: Link to historic occupational, agricultural and economic development data at the national to parish-level.

• Energy History: Historic legacy of energy generation (watermill and windmill data) reviewed against modern renewable energy generation.

• Locations and Networks: Input and test data for archaeological predictive modelling, ecological niche modelling or point pattern analysis involving occurrence data constrained by a linear network (i.e., rivers, roads, rail).

Mills of Britain viewer

Example of ‘mill’ terms from the Roy Gazetteer: To identify potential mill sites from the Roy Military Survey Map, the project team used text search terms like ‘mill’ and ‘mhuillan’ to identify mill sites from the Roy Gazetteer. These terms also show up when referring to streams, such as ‘Mill Burn’, ‘Millhill’, or villages (‘Achmill’). In the case of these sites, it was important to remove duplicate geographic text. Blue boxes = search hits from the Roy Gazetteer.