An impressive display of mill power
Martin Watts: no run-of the-mill speaker Living as we do on the coast, it’s all too easy to think that Devon’s all about seaside holiday resorts, smugglers’ coves, sea shanties and swashbuckling nautical heroes of the past. So the subject of a talk on 26 November in Knowle Village Hall was well chosen by the Otter Valley Association, given the importance of mill power over the centuries in our corner of the West Country. And they couldn’t have chosen a better speaker than Martin Watts from Cullompton. One of only thirteen practising millwrights listed in the Mills section of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, he was able to draw on his many years’ experience as a miller and student of mills since the 1960s. With an impressive range of slides and a seemingly endless supply of facts about rivers, leats, millstones, gearing, overshot and undershot wheels he kept his 60-strong audience fas...