Eling Tide Mill is a water mill that harnesses the power of the tide to grind wheat into wholemeal flour.
Situated on the edge of Southampton Water beside the renowned New Forest, there has been a mill on the site for over 900 years, although it has had to be rebuilt several times, with the current building being some 230 years old. Tide mills were once an important part of the economy of many countries, such as Great Britain and the United States of America - the latter having many hundreds of tide mills on the eastern coast from the 17th to 19th centuries. Tidal power was harnessed in this fashion not only for milling flour, but for everything from sawing lumber and operating the bellows and hammers in ironworks, to manufacturing paper and cotton, to grinding spices, pepper and gunpowder. Before the advent of the steam engine they were the one kind of large-scale mill that was pretty much guaranteed to be able to run 365 days of the year.
Unfortunately they suffered far more than the river and wind mills after they were gradually abandoned in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and very few survive even as derelicts. There are only four tide mills open to the public in the entire United Kingdom, and none at all in the U.S.A.
Eling Tide Mill, although abandoned in the 1940s, had the great good fortune to survive until it was restored between 1975 and 1980, at which time it re-opened as both a working mill, and a museum to this part of our industrial heritage. It is the only fully working and productive tide mill in the United Kingdom, once again producing flour as it had throughout the last Millennium. It is, in fact, one of only two productive tide mills in the entire world (to the best of our knowledge), and the only one producing what it was built to produce.
