by Michael Cowan
Harnham Mill at the southern end of Town Path is built across a leat drawn from the River Nadder. Although there were earlier mills on the site the present long low ashlar {squared stone} and flint chequered building was built as a paper mill in about 1500 and is today the oldest surviving former paper mill in the country. It is often referred to as a ‘delightful and picturesque old [insert century to taste] mill’ with a somewhat dismissive ‘together with the Victorian warehouse’. This was in fact originally a yarn ’manufactory’ built shortly after 1810. The two disparate structures are now in combined use as The Old Mill Hotel. The paper mill was built on the site of an earlier fulling, or cloth, mill known to have been in existence before 1299, occupied by the Pynnoks who were still in possession in 1374. Eventually, as Salisbury’s medieval cloth industry declined the fulling mill must have beome redundant and a wealthy entrepreneurial individual invested in the newly developing market of making paper.
Making paper meant pulping rags in troughs of water with stamping hammers raised and then dropped by tappets on the wheel shaft, as indicated in 1700 when the mill was sold, including the ‘wheels, shaft, stockes, hammers, troughs and all other things belonging to the milling or beating of stuffe to make paper’. After two hundred years as a paper mill, by 1714 the building had reverted to fulling, using machinery not unlike that for papermaking except that hammer action was to push and circulate the cloth to compact the fibres. By 1840 special machinery had been installed to grind bone meal – hence the enduring name of ‘the old bone mill’. This was taken out by 1879 when Mr Sangar leased the building as a tallow chandler and still occupied it in 1931, when it was sold as part of the Fisherton Mill estate.