Worsbrough Mill
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Worsbrough Mill, also known as Worsbrough Corn Mill and Worsbrough Mill Farm is a complex of buildings including a Seventeenth Century water powered mill and a Nineteenth Century steam-powered mill in Worsbrough. It is open to the public and takes its water from the River Dove, but is hydraulically separate from Worsbrough Reservoir.
It is in Worsbrough Country Park, about 2 miles south of Barnsley on the A61, close to the M1 motorway. Note that "Worsbrough" refers to an area that includes today's Worsbrough Bridge, Worsbrough Dale, and Worsbrough Common.
A Worsbrough Mill was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and local historian Robert Shawland-Ball states that a "tenuous but continuous documentary record can be traced from then to 1625...A mill was a very important part of the feudal pattern of life and settlement and thus tended to remain on the same site if that site was a satisfactory one".
The oldest building (the Old Mill) is a two-storey watermill with massive lintels over the doors; it is operational and mills a small amount of grain. There is some doubt over the date of construction; there are no dates on or in the buildings (with one exception) but 1625 has been stated (by Shawland-Ball) to be "acceptably representative".
The New Mill originally contained a Watt beam engine which was replaced in 1922 by a 1911 model Hornsby hot bulb oil engine that still functions, but is not linked to a grindstone. The building is known to have been completed 1843 but was not present on a detailed map of 1840.
