Held at:	Private Collection
Reference:	RS
Source:	Original documents
Title:	A brief history of The Mill Cottages [now The Gables]
Place name:	Michaelchurch Escley
Date:	c.1978

Description:

In February 1978 Michael Hunter, owner of the Michaelchurch Estate, sold the freehold of a property then known as The Mill Cottages to Jackie Stewart, wife of local builder Ronnie Stewart. The Mill Cottages had apparently been part of the Michaelchurch Estate since time immemorial, though there are few other documented references to the property by that name. The original conveyance dated February 1978 is lost, but is referred to in other surviving documentation.

The adjacent Corn Mill at Michaelchurch was also a long-standing part of the Michaelchurch Estate and had never included residential accommodation for the miller or other workers employed there. Prior to the mid nineteenth century, records show that the mill was largely operated by transient journeymen millers or ‘servants’ of the Estate. About 1835 this changed with the building of a new ‘Mill House’ to accommodate a full-time resident miller and his family. Contemporary references to this include a note that it was built on a ‘new site’, and it is in fact located across the road from the Mill Cottages of the 1978 conveyance. This seems to support the assumption that the Mill Cottages had been previously used to house journeyman millers or as tied accommodation for estate workers employed in the Corn Mill, as the name would suggest.

The historical record makes no further direct reference to the Mill Cottages after the establishment of the new Mill House, until the conveyance of 1978. It is however reasonable to assume that they fell into decay, since by the early 1900s there are suggestions that the premises were in use as a barn to accommodate a Seed Merchant business run by the miller’s family alongside the general stores and Post Office they had established at the Mill House opposite. The Seed Merchant business closed in about 1943 along with the Corn Mill itself as a consequence of agricultural controls imposed during the Second World War. The barn then appears to have been left derelict until its redevelopment in 1978 as a residential property subsequently named as ‘The Gables’.

The photograph below, courtesy of John Royal, shows the property in 1978 shortly after the commencement of its conversion.