A History of Lode Water Mill
The village of Lode lies about seven miles north-east of Cambridge, on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens.
On the borders of the village is Anglesey Abbey, a fine country house built on the foundations of an Augustinian priory of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, standing in magnificent grounds which were laid out by the first Lord Fairhaven.
The property is now owned and administered by the National Trust.
At one end of the Abbey grounds stands a fine watermill, clad in white-painted weatherboarding.
Once a thriving part of village life, Lode Mill has been idle since the 1920s.
Claude Page ©The National Trust
The mill is situated at the point where Quy Water meets Bottisham Lode, which gives its name to the village.
The lodes are man-made waterways built some time between Roman and medieval times to bring supplies to the villages via the River Cam and to take away their produce.
Bottisham Lode is the southernmost in this part of Cambridgeshire, and is smaller and shallower than others in the area.
Traffic ceased around 1890 with the arrival of the railway.
A watermill may have stood on the site of Lode Mill at the time of the Domesday Survey, but the present structure most likely dates from the eighteenth century.
In 1793 the mill was described in a sale notice as 'Anglesea Watermill with dwelling house, yard, garden, barn, stables and outhouse and 3 acres of pasture adjoining'.
At that time a lease was held by one James Harris. In 1883 the mill was owned by Lewis Tottman, who also owned Swaffham Bulbeck Mill.
In about 1900 the mill was converted from corn grinding to cement grinding. Cement is generally made by firing a mixture of clay and lime or natural chalk at about 1400°C and grinding the resulting clinker into a powder.
A photograph taken in the early 1900s shows the mill with an adjoining 'industrial' building and a house on the eastern bank.
A set of six kilns for the manufacture of the cement and a mobile crane running on a railway track lay between the mill and what is now the Quarry Pool.
The mill was owned by the Bottisham Lode Cement and Brick Company but competition killed the business by about 1920 and the mill became derelict.
In 1926 Anglesey Abbey was bought by Huttleston Broughton, later Lord Fairhaven, who created the beautiful gardens we see today.
In 1934 he acquired the mill, and set about restoring it to its corn milling condition.
This was completed in 1935-6, after the removal of the mining and cement making equipment.
In 1978 the Cambridgeshire Wind and Watermill Society offered to restore the mill to working order and in 1982 it was once again milling corn, for sale to visitors.
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