Apple Tree Wassail

Yesterday was Old New Year and millers gathered to wassail the apple trees at Stretton.  The trees give us a wonderful harvest of fruit in autumn and their wood can be used to fashion replacement teeth for the gears in the mill.  We've recently lost a few of our older trees and replaced them with young trees, all of which are old Cheshire varieties bringing intriguing stories with them.  We felt it was right to look after the old trees and the help the younger ones to flourish.  And so what better to do than keep the ancient tradition of wassailing the trees to help them bear well in the coming year.

As dusk fell, friends began to gather and share news, all feeling that we were taking part in something "old", a tradition to be kept alive.

We enjoyed mulled cider, keeping us warm against the crisp frost that had been around all day.

Tom told the story of the Apple Tree Man, a folk tale all about the wassail and how trees will look after us if we look after them.

Then we collected toast to hang in the branches for the birds and rattles and bells to drive off the witches before setting off to process through our trees.

We made our way back to the oldest apple tree at the mill, being led through the deepening dark by Tom playing the Apple Tree Wassail on his double pipes.

We sang to the old apple tree and poured cider on the roots.

And then it was off down the road to the friendly Carden Arms for food, catching up with friends and music.

We're looking forward to what the year brings for our apple trees and we'll be wassailing the trees again next year as our mill is all about keeping traditions alive.

The Marvellous Mill in Miniature

Beside Stretton Watermill is a sandstone shippen 199 years old.  It's only small but there's a lot fitted in.  Amongst its many uses are a greeting place, a meeting place, a little shop, somewhere for schoolchildren to hear stories or puzzle over cogs and gears, a place for millers to have a cup of tea and it's also a sort-of little museum telling some of the mill's stories.  But inside this little building there is another much smaller.

In the early 1980s Reg Crabtree, a greatly talented modelmaker, made wonderful miniatures full of life and detail for several museums across the North West, maybe further afield too.  No matter how much we value the experience of "the real" and stepping into the original building, people are still drawn to models - the chance to see a whole building in one glance, as if a giant peering down.

Mr Crabtree made this model of Stretton Watermill.  Completely to scale and very detailed.

But it's more than your usual model, as layers can be removed taking the mill back through the centuries. 

This is the mill as you will find it today, the last changes having been made in the 1850s.

Taking away the extension over the breastshot wheel and the corridor at the back, which millers have used as a tiny office, we see it as in the 1770s with its new coat of sandstone blocks, weatherboards and slate roof along with the second waterwheel.

Finally, removing these layers, we get back to a mill in 1630, a timber frame structure in the process of being built.

Then, the layers are replaced, squeezing nearly four hundred years into a single minute.