Worsbrough Mill

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Worsbrough Mill, also known as Worsbrough Corn Mill and Worsbrough Mill Farm is a complex of buildings including a Seventeenth Century water powered mill and a Nineteenth Century steam-powered mill in Worsbrough. It is open to the public and takes its water from the River Dove, but is hydraulically separate from Worsbrough Reservoir.

Image:Worsbrough Mill 2005.jpg

It is in Worsbrough Country Park, about 2 miles south of Barnsley on the A61, close to the M1 motorway. Note that "Worsbrough" refers to an area that includes today's Worsbrough Bridge, Worsbrough Dale, and Worsbrough Common.

A Worsbrough Mill was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and local historian Robert Shawland-Ball states that a "tenuous but continuous documentary record can be traced from then to 1625...A mill was a very important part of the feudal pattern of life and settlement and thus tended to remain on the same site if that site was a satisfactory one".

The oldest building (the Old Mill) is a two-storey watermill with massive lintels over the doors; it is operational and mills a small amount of grain. There is some doubt over the date of construction; there are no dates on or in the buildings (with one exception) but 1625 has been stated (by Shawland-Ball) to be "acceptably representative".

The New Mill originally contained a Watt beam engine which was replaced in 1922 by a 1911 model Hornsby hot bulb oil engine that still functions, but is not linked to a grindstone. The building is known to have been completed 1843 but was not present on a detailed map of 1840.