The village of New Abbey, some five miles south of Dumfries, is best known as home to Sweetheart Abbey, whose remains dominate the eastern part of the village. But at New Abbey's western end is another, much less well known treasure: New Abbey Cornmill.
Those intending to visit New Abbey Cornmill used to have to use the car park at the far, eastern, end of the village, close to Sweetheart Abbey. This was only a quarter of a mile from the cornmill, but the pavements through the village are narrow to non-existent in places. Things have improved significantly with the creation of a dedicated small car park opposite the corn mill.
But care is still the order of the day once you reach the cornmill. If you are fortunate enough to see one of the informative and highly entertaining demonstrations of the mill in action, you'll be told in as much detail as you want the consequences of catching hair, clothing or body parts in working machinery whose best time for an emergency stop is two minutes.
The demonstration starts at the mill pond behind the mill. Here a sluice allows water to flow down to the large nine-spoked water wheel behind the mill. Once in the ground floor of the mill you see how the rotation of the water wheel is translated into usable motion by a series of large and very greasy gearwheels. The real heart of the mill is on the middle floor, the stones floor. Here three sets of millstones work to grind feed for animals and food for humans.
The upper floor of the mill, the loft, was added in the 1800s. This was mainly used for storage of the grain before and between the various stages in the process. It would originally have been carried here from the lower levels, in sacks each weighing 22 stones or about 140kg. Later they used power from the mill machinery to drive a sack hoist, saving time and a great deal of effort.
New Abbey Cornmill as you see it today was built in the very late 1700s. Unusually it combined the working mill with a house for the miller. This is useful today, providing space for the Historic Environment Scotland exhibition and shop, and the room in which they like you to watch a video about the milling process at the start of your tour. But during the mill's active working life the ever-present danger of fire resulting from the need to dry the grain in a kiln before milling it meant that this was a very risky arrangement.
Elsewhere it was much more common for the miller's house to be in a separate building: so that when the mill burned down (as mills often did) it didn't take the house with it.
Although the building you see today is little more than 200 years old, it reused the site of a very much older mill, built by monks from Sweetheart Abbey five hundred or more years earlier. Much of the water management system associated with the mill, including the millpond and the 1km long mill lade serving it, were probably originally built by monks from the abbey.
A visit to New Abbey Cornmill is highly recommended, either combined with a tour of Sweetheart Abbey (joint tickets are available) or in its own right. And if you have a chance to see the mill machinery in action you really should take advantage of it: just be careful where you stick those fingers...