Site Record

1. Disused corn mill with probable over-shot water wheel. Some machinery still remaining.
N.J.Roberts, RCAHMW, 301/07/2009.

2. Felin Boduan is a derelict two-storey water corn mill, built of rubblestone with a pitched slated roof which is beginning to collapse. Most of the machinery has been removed. Water from a right-bank tributary of the Afon Rhyd-hir was stored in a mill pond, now silted up, 50 metres north-west of the mill. From there it was carried on a wooden trough supported on stone pillars (one of which remains) to an overshot wheel in an enclosed, but not roofed, wheelpit on the west gable of the mill. The wheel has been removed, but would have been about 16 feet in diameter and 3ft 6 inches wide (4.9 metres by 1.07 metres). A ring gear on the rim drove a layshaft under a heavy timber hurst frame along the north side of the mill, which would have carried bevel gears driving three pairs of stones set out in line. The layshaft and gears have been removed, but two pairs of stones remain (one french pair with the runner raised, one Anglesey? pair) with their spindles and stone nuts suspended below. At the west end the hurst frame has collapsed under the third pair, worn very thin, of Anglesey stones, revealing a square-cut thickening under the bedstone. The means of disengaging the stone nuts is unusually sophisticated, using a hand-driven geared shaft and two toothed racks to raise them from the tapered square sections of the stone spindles.

The west end of the building contains a drying kiln, the hopper section of the furnace formed from heavy slate slabs. It was not possible to see whether the perforated floor survives.

Despite the removal of most of the machinery, the surviving evidence and the layout suggest that this was an unusually sophisticated milling installation for this area of Wales, probably dating from the second half of the nineteenth century.
W J Crompton, RCAHMW, 21 July 2011.