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.