Sunday 28 November 2010

Starting the Old Mill up again!

Lindsey and I have been chatting to quite a few people in the village about starting up the watermill again as part of a wish to create community renewable energy project for Warcop. It's been amazing to find out what villagers did 80 or so years ago on their own, because they dug a beck all the way from Hayberghyll, the other side of the A66 to a feeder pond now located within the Army camp. It was a huge project with sluice gates, overflow ponds, interconnected to the becks that flowed through the village to the River Eden. This water system provided clean water to the village (goodness knows why the authorities stopped Warcop accessing it!!!) & powered an overshot waterwheel at the Old Mill, which drove dynamos adapted from one of the saw mills located here. I'm told that even during the harshest drowts in Eden area the spring at Haberghyll never dried up it constantly flowed. I'd already been in touch with a few Hydro companies and hopefully with a bit of help from grants/loans as part of being the Big Society, we might be able to get this up & running with the addition of other forms of renewable energy such as solar panels etc.

Everytime we start chatting to anyone about this, people in the area start giving us valued ideas history and feedback, which has been absolutely brilliant.

I think we're trying to organise holding a meeting to discuss all this...but any feedback, assistance, ideas on this blog would be greatly appreciated. It would be brilliant if Warcop could be put on a firm footing to self sustainability, generating electricity as a co-operative & any excess could be sold back to the grid.