This is the first of two posts on the primordial role of the River Frome in creating the prosperous county town in which we now live.
Since pre-Roman England wherever humans have tilled the soil, streams have been used to power waterwheels to mill the corn and other cereals grown by them. In the 1960s a Roman period stone milling wheel was found in the bed of the Frome in Fordington. It was offered to the County Museum…. This knowledge prompted me to look at the surviving evidence of this activity, which was central to the existence of the town, surrounded as it is by fertile agricultural land.
My starting point is ‘Millers’ Close’, the name of the road which starts at the foot of the Grove, which signals that there was once a mill called West Mill on the main channel of the Frome as it enters the town. It was used for the milling of cereals, principally corn, together with animal bone. Its site, spanning the river, is prominent on the 1888 Ordnance Survey map of the western edge of the town (Photo 1).
It was captured four times in water colours by Henry Joseph Moule, including in 1901 (Photo 2), 
and can also be seen standing at the foot of Poundbury Fort, on the left, in an 18th century print (Photo 3).
The survey of Dorset Buildings published by the Ministry of Works in 1955 describes it as follows: “Two storeys of brick above a stone plinth and with a slated roof, is of early 19th century and now stripped of all of its machinery. It is a plain rectangular building with segmental-headed doorways and windows. Towards the N. end of the W. elevation two low segmental arches indicate the entry of the millrace, which has been filled in. Further E. in the same wall are the remains of a small sluice.”
All that now remains is masonry on the riverbanks which constrict the flow of the river as it flows into the mill race (Photo 4, which was a struggle to obtain!).
During the medieval period the Franciscan friars occupied a friary which is thought to have initially been on the castle site, where the Prison now stands. It would then have moved down to the riverbanks, at the foot of Friary Lane where the friars were gifted a watermill to mill their crops of cereals. The flow of the river was divided where John’s Pond is situated, and the channels reunited just downstream of the mill. The site of the wheel can still be clearly seen (Photo 5), 
as can a small stone arch on the side of the walk along the river, just after the sharp turn left and then right of the millstream, together with a line of stone blocks imbedded in the stream (Photo 6). 
The mill survived into the beginning of the 20th century when it was also used as a sawmill. Again, it was painted by Henry Joseph Moule, this time in 1884 (Photo 7). 
A small house now occupies the site of the former mill building.
A little further downstream next to the Victorian footbridge was a tannery probably owned by the Greenings family, who were farmers, saddlers and harness makers and who also ran a shop for their products in High East Street. It would have been a source of considerable pollution, although one suspects the stream was then further polluted whilst it flowed through Fordington! All that remains of the tannery is the charming row of small cottages built to house the employees in a narrow passage which leads from High East Street to the river, which is known as ‘The Greenings’ (Photo 8). 
Some still possess their former outside privies on the opposite side of the passage (Photo 9).
In Fordington the water’s power was once again harnessed to drive a miller’s wheel for the milling of cereal crops, on a site north-east of the church. The mill existed as far back as 1086 when it was recorded in the Domesday Book, and it was then granted by King John to Bindon Abbey in 1211. It was rebuilt between 1590 and 1607 by William and John Churchill of Colliton House, who also owned a house in Fordington. It was again rebuilt, this time in brick, as two separate sawmills by 1841 and supplemented by steam power in 1895. Finally, it was converted into housing by the Mill Street Housing Society in 1940 and remodelled and enlarged, over a bridge spanning the stream, by John Stark and Partners in 1986 (Photo 10).
All that remains of the original early 17th century building is a stone panel set high in the present south wall in which a seated figure holds a shield. Over that figure is the date 1590. According to Hutchins, the shield used to be inscribed with the words, ‘Do Wel to All Men’ (Photo 11).
Only the stone panel is protected by being listed Grade II.
Having left the outskirts of Fordington, the Frome then flowed into Louds Mill, on a site now occupied by an agricultural machinery distributor, next to the Dorchester waste disposal centre. A fulling mill for the cleaning and thickening of cloth, made from the wool of local sheep, existed here at the beginning of the 17th century. This was replaced in 1799 and enlarged in 1824-6 to become William Stanton’s Cloth Factory, an early example of a factory using the techniques then being developed by the industrial revolution to harness the power of water to drive machinery.
The original substantial four storey brick building was extended in the early 19th century by a three-block range together with lower structures, one of which housed the mill wheel. It was painted several times by Henry Joseph Moule (e.g. Photo 12). 
Unfortunately, the factory ceased to be competitive with those in northern towns which, as the 19th century progressed, introduced cloth factories powered by steam engines fuelled by coal. The premises were subsequently converted into homes.
Although the whole structure was, and remains, a Grade II listed building by reason of its historical importance, most of it has been demolished since the listing. There remains a long, disfigured brick building, reduced to two storeys and re-roofed with corrugated iron (Photo 13).
At the north end is the former stable building with a circular corn store. This has been converted into a home (Photos 14 and 15). 
The mill wheel has disappeared. A sad loss.
IAN GOSLING,
CHAIR OF DORCHESTER CIVIC SOCIETY
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