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There’s power in them there hills
ISLAND ICON: The 72ft Lady Isabella waterwheel became a tourist attraction at its opening in 1854 and, thanks to its preservation after the Laxey mines closed, remains a draw to visitors today. BELOW: This Victorian photograph shows another sizeable waterwheel, and extraordinary stone and timber supports for its supply ducts, associated with Great Mona Mines workings in Ballaglass Glen. Today the wheel has gone but the associated buildings survive as a ruin.
As the world continues to wrestle with the problem of how to reduce its reliance on carbon fuels, Simon Artymiuk looks at how the island has used its abundant water supply for a number of centuries
For centuries the ‘green energy’ that waterpower provided was crucial in the Isle of Man due to the lack of wood because of deforestation and also as the island had no native sources of coal, only slow-burning peat.
With its hilly interior, the island had no shortage of fast-flowing streams, however, and the earliest use of waterpower was for the milling of grain.
The derivation of the name of the Cornaa valley (and of adjacent Corany and Cardle) in Maughold parish is the Norse ‘Kvernardalr’ – ‘mill stone dale or glen’.
The mill after which the Vikings named the valley would have been what is now known as ‘Norse horizontal’ type but which was, in fact, originally introduced to the island by monks from Ireland. In Manx they were known as Mwyllin Beg (‘little mills’) and that at Cornaa may originally have been associated with the early monastery at Maughold.
In a Mwyllin Beg the millstones would have been housed in an upper room and a vertical axle tree would then have passed down through a rotating grindstone to a horizontal waterwheel moved by jets of water from the river entering cup-like vanes on its frame. Such mills could work with a relatively small water supply.
The now more familiar vertical type of waterwheel, the Vitruvian wheel, was probably introduced to the Isle of Man by monks from Cumbria in the 12th century, perhaps when Rushen Abbey was established by Furness Abbey in 1134. Such wheels had gearing to transmit power to the millstones. A good example of a mill interior, now restored and powered by electricity, is occasionally opened to the public at Kentraugh, near Colby, while the corn mill at Laxey, now a cafe, has just had its upright wheel and its millpond restored.
In a system established in the 12th century, when the island was still under Norse rule, each parish had a mill and each farmer was assigned a mill to which he had to take his grain to be ground into flour. The miller then paid the King of Mann for the right to use the island’s water as a power source.
By the late medieval period all residents of Maughold Parish and Ramsey were required to grind their corn in the mill at the foot of Ballaglass Glen. The area then belonged to the monastery of St Bees in Cumberland, hence the naming of nearby Rhenab (Manx for Abbot’s Division).
After the Reformation the mill passed first to the Earls of Derby and then to the Christian family of Milntown. In 1642 it was the property of William Christian, ‘Illiam Dhone’. It ceased working in 1951 but the millwheel remains.
Another important use of waterpower was for fulling – the finishing of cloth by pounding it in water, along with plants such as soapwort, using enormous wooden mallets. This both cleaned and thickened the cloth to make it durable and weatherproof. Again the process may have been introduced to the island by monks.
Early Manx fulling, or ‘tuck’, mills existed at St John’s and downstream of Mullin-y-Quinney on Santon Burn, but in the early 19th century William Kelly built the large woollen mill on the Douglas to Peel road that became known as Union Mills, and former corn mills at Sulby and Rhenwyllan, near Port St Mary, were converted into woollen mills. A mill in the upper part of Glen Helen was uniquely a Mwyllin Beg used for textile production. Other small watermills were used to crush gorse into a feed for farm animals and to process rags for paper production.
Many small mills in the 18th century were used in linen production. Known as ‘scutch mills’, they usually had a ‘dub’, or pond, in which the flax plants were first soaked (‘retted’).
For the finished linen bleach greens are known to have existed at Lower Laxey and two sites at St John’s. In 1790 Moore’s linen mills were established near Douglas, later supplying sails for Brunel’s SS Great Britain and the Royal Navy, and some of its sailcloth survives on the Manx ship Star of India preserved in San Diego, USA.
As Chris Aspin has revealed in his recently published booklet The Decoy, in 1779 a Sheffield clockmaker and inventor named Francis Wheelhouse set up a mill using water-powered cotton spinning machines like those developed by Richard Arkwright of Derbyshire on a site between Castletown and Ballasalla. George Quayle of Peggy fame is thought to have been one of the investors, but in 1790 Wheelhouse suddenly absconded to Portugal, where he helped that country kick-start its own industrial revolution using waterpower. In 1793 George Quayle received a medal from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce for his method of equalising the water in waterwheels.
In the mid-19th century millwheel technology was applied to the many metal ore mines across the island. The most famous of these is, of course, the 72ft ‘Lady Isabella’ in the Laxey Valley.
Mining was started in the valley in the late 18th century by a company from Cumberland. This became the Great Laxey Mining Company in 1846, when the workings became the foremost silver, lead and zinc mine in the British Isles.
The Lady Isabella was needed to drain the workings and was designed by the local man Robert Casement. The wheel was given a grand opening ceremony, watched by hundreds of people, in 1854 and it worked pumps in an engine shaft 450 yards away.
Elsewhere in the valley there were numerous other, smaller waterwheels – the restored Lady Evelyn wheel on the old washing floor in central Laxey represents a similar wheel that once stood on the site, but it was originally installed in the Snaefell Mine further up the valley and returned to the island after periods of use in Cornwall and South Wales.
From the early 1880s miners in the valley were spared the ordeal of an hour’s climb down slippery ladders into the workings at the start of the day, and another hour’s ascent at the end of their shift, by the installation of a waterpowered ‘man engine’, by which workers were raised on wooden platforms up and down the shaft in 12ft stages.
In the Cornaa Valley, the Great Mona Mine in the upper part of Ballaglass Glen operated using a large wheel from 1854 to 1858, and again from 1866 to 1868, with large sums being expended to extract a disappointingly small amount of copper, zinc and lead.
Near the top of the Corany Valley, the North Laxey Mine had a longer period of operation, from 1856 to 1897, with two shafts reaching 174 fathoms (1,044ft) and 110 fathoms (660ft). It employed two waterwheels, one, named Florence, at 60ft diameter was not much smaller than Lady Isabella. The other wheel, at just 30ft, was used for winding and crushing.
The Glen Cherry Mine, a little further down the same valley, also disappointed the hopes of the North Laxey and Glen Cherry Consuls – this time employing a Cornish steam engine and a 30ft waterwheel in its two shafts.
It lasted only from 1865 to 1875, with a brief reopening in 1889. It reached a depth of 270ft.
In Dhoon Glen, the East Laxey Lead Mine (also called the Rhennie Laxey Lead and Zinc Mine) worked unprofitably from 1859-69.
The stone wheelcase of its 50ft waterwheel can still be seen in the upper part of the glen. There are similar remnants in Glen Maye.
Another wheelcase survives in the valley above Kirk Michael, sometimes called Wheal Michael due to the Cornish origins of its miners.
Elsewhere, visible from the Millennium Way, is the case of a 50ft wheel used to power an unsuccessful search for lead at the Sulby River Mining Company’s Beinn-y-Phott Mine.
Other wheelcases can be seen in the Foxdale area and at Abbeylands and in the East Baldwin Valley. The latter two were built by Cain of Onchan – that at East Baldwin is recorded to have cost £90 and to have had its components hauled on a sledge over Slieu Ree by the Douglas Volunteers.
For a modern use of waterpower, we have to turn to the Sulby Reservoir completed in 1983. Here a small hydro-electric scheme uses the reservoir at Block Eary as a ‘header tank’ and generators are concealed in a stone-faced structure built to resemble an old Manx watermill.
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Weather for Isle of Man
Sunday 19 May 2013
Today
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Temperature: 9 C to 15 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: South
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Temperature: 8 C to 14 C
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