It is believed that a mill existed on the site of Cotehele from medieval times though the current buildings date from the 19th Century. The buildings are Grade II Listed.
More photographs of Cotehele Mill can be found here:
www.jhluxton.com/Industrial-Archaeology/Mills-and-Factori...
In the 1860s that the tenants, the Langsford family, extended the mill. They added a bakery on one side and a sawmill on the other, as well as a second water wheel, to provide power for the sawmill.
The current structure hasn't changed much since the 1930s, when large flour mills meant it became difficult for small mills like Cotehele to compete.
Although the family concentrated on milling feed for animals for a while, the relative inaccessibility of the site made it uneconomical. In 1964, the last member of the Langsford family gave up the long-standing tenancy of the mill.
The range of tools and equipment on display gives visitors a glimpse of how wheelwrights, saddlers, carpenters, and blacksmiths lived and worked in the past.
Power from the nearby Morden stream drives both the mill wheel and a hydro electric turbine, with any unused electricity being fed back efficiently into the National Trust grid so it can be utilised elsewhere.
The water runs back into the Morden, and from there, into Cornwall's most iconic river, the Tamar: the two waterways meet at the quay.
Unfortunately a storm in 2020 damaged the weir on the Mordern Stream which means that until a solution to repairing the weir is found the mill cannot operate.
